


The (Almost)s

by TheIcyQueen



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: (and then very very FAST burn), Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Bad Jokes, Body Horror, Character Study, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Horror, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Mutual Pining, Psychological Horror, Slow Burn, allusions to the events of "The Inpatient", like...exceptionally bad jokes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2019-10-05 05:22:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 286,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17318804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheIcyQueen/pseuds/TheIcyQueen
Summary: Hannah and Beth Washington go missing from their family's lodge after a pretty terrible prank their friends pull. When they STAY missing, things get really complicated really fast--particularly for their brother Josh. It's hard to find comfort from your friends when they're the ones you blame most for your pain. Grief, grudges, and growing up all have their own effect on friendships, but just because a relationship is changing...well, it doesn't always mean it's changing for the best.A character study meant to examine the relationships between Josh, Chris, Ash, and Sam, spanning from the night the twins went missing, to the aftermath of when they were found a year later.





	1. Where Hannah is (embarrassed to death)

**Author's Note:**

> Yet again, I find myself showing up a few years late to a horror fandom, Starbucks in hand. This is my first project for UD, but I'm super excited to get this monster out! There will (obviously) be spoilers for the game down the line, so bear that in mind. 
> 
> For those of you who find this fic familiar...welcome back! It's a reupload, as I switched AO3 accounts. I just want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, if you were someone who left me a comment/review on the original fic, I absolutely saved that before I switched accounts!! I can't tell you how much your feedback means to me, and thank you, thank you a million times over for reading! (And for some of you, CONTINUING to read, even though I've moved everything to a new account!)
> 
> Relevant tags for this chapter: References to underage drinking (depending on where you live, of course), references to blood and gore, references to cannibalism, indelicate discussion of mental illnesses and mental institutions as part of a ghost story, vomit, the author thinking she's funny.

**Friday, January 31, 2014  
****6:28pm**  
  
“I just have a good feeling about this weekend,” Hannah said, thoughtfully twisting a piece of hair around her finger. “Just a really, _really_ good feeling.”  
  
“Oh yeah?” Sam glanced over her shoulder, pausing in hanging up her coat. “Any reason in particular, or just cuz?” She cocked an eyebrow in Hannah’s direction and smiled knowingly—it _did_ feel like it was going to be a good weekend, she had to admit. Winter break hadn’t lasted _nearly_ long enough, and the thought of spending a few days far, far away from textbooks and early morning classes sounded like absolute paradise. But of course, Sam knew Hannah, and so she knew _her_ excitement was hardly from the promise of clear skies and the smell of mountain air.  
  
No, she knew _exactly_ why Hannah had been all but trembling with anticipation since they’d first climbed into the cable car at the base of the mountain. Sam _knew_ her, and _that_ was why her playful smirk lacked a matching, playful laugh.  
  
“Well…I mean…you know…” Hannah’s demeanor suddenly became impassive—an act so obvious that it was almost painful to watch. “Cuz, like…Mike’s coming…” She let her voice trail off, shrugging jerkily in punctuation.  
  
Sam sighed, zipping her coat so that it wouldn’t slip off the hanger. She shut the closet door slowly, considering her words very, very carefully. This was the minefield she’d been trying to avoid the entire trip up to the lodge, and now it seemed she had stepped directly into the blast zone. “Yup,” she agreed, “Mike is definitely coming.” Pausing for a beat, she folded her arms across her chest. “Aaaaand so is _Emily_.”  
  
The color of Hannah’s face paled and then darkened with embarrassment. She averted her eyes, looking down to the puddles of melting snow gathering around her boots. “But…” A corner of her mouth tucked in, as though in concentration. For a moment, she seemed to consider saying something else, but seemed to think better of it. Instead, she bent down and began painstakingly unlacing her boots.  
  
“But?” Sam prompted, toeing her own boots off, wobbling in an awkward dance to keep her socks from getting wet. When there was no immediate response, she tried again. “ _But_ …?”  
  
_But_ Hannah’s attention had been riveted by something else. Eyes wide, boots in hand, she stared at the mat by the door. It was only then, it seemed, she had realized just how many _other_ pairs of shoes sat there, caked with mud and salt. “Oh my God,” she muttered, voice hardly louder than a frantic whisper. She ran the numbers in her head, trying to play a strange matching game between boots and owners. “Who’s already here? Are we the last ones?” And then, even quieter, “ _Shoot!_ Is _Mike_ here already?!”  
  
Sam rolled her eyes to the ceiling. _And so it begins_ , she thought to herself, resisting the urge to sigh again. With a soft, albeit _very_ tired, smile, she added her boots to the pile on the mat, reaching over and setting a hand on Hannah’s shoulder. “Han,” she said calmly. “Please chill.” From the other side of the door, almost as if on cue, a gust of wind whistled by, shooting an icy draft through the cracks of the front door. “ _Oof!_ Bad choice of words!” she laughed, relieved when Hannah joined in. Sam slid her hand down to Hannah’s elbow, guiding her further into the lodge. “God, I always forget how _cold_ it gets up here…”  
  
“Yeah…I just hope that the storm the weather channel was talking about doesn’t hit until we’re back in class…” Hannah cast one last look out of the entryway’s window before stepping into the warmth of the living area with Sam. “Wouldn’t that be a bummer? If we got totally snowed in?”  
  
“Hmm…getting stuck in a luxury resort instead of going back to class? Yeah, that would definitely be a bummer.” Sam rocked onto the balls of her feet as they paused in front of the coffee table, brow knitting. Save for everyone’s boots on the mat and coats in the closet, there really wasn’t sign of anyone else in the lodge. The shutters were drawn on the windows, barely letting in any of the fading daylight, there was no fire in the grate, there were no cups leaving watery rings on the tables. More to the point, there was no one in the dining room, as far as she could see, no one in the hallway…and even as she strained her ears, there were no voices to be heard. _Weird_. Could they have been upstairs? Maybe picking out bedrooms for the weekend? They’d find out one way or another, Sam figured, turning back to Hannah as she folded her arms across her chest. “But no more avoiding the question. You were going to say something about Mike and Emily.”  
  
Stepping into the heated room had caused Hannah’s glasses to fog up, but still, Sam could see her eyes dart from one side of the lodge to the other as her own had only a moment ago. Even though there was no one to be seen, she lowered her voice to a tense stage whisper. “I just…I don’t think the whole Mike-and-Emily thing is going to last, that’s all. I don’t think…I don’t think her being here like… _necessarily_ means that nothing’s going to happen. With him, I mean. And me.”  
  
“Because…?”  
  
“Because…I don’t know. They like, fight on Facebook a lot. Not _fight_ -fight, but they get into very stupid, very _public_ arguments. And Mike’s…” Her gaze focused on middle space, becoming more far-off as she thought. “He’s just so much more _mature_ than she is, you know? He’s in college now! He’s probably been figuring himself out and like…” Hannah shrugged, “I don’t know…going on some sort of journey of self-exploration. Maybe he’s realizing that Emily isn’t _great_ for him, and—”  
  
“The only ‘journey of self-exploration’ guys like Michael-Fucking-Munroe ever go on are the kind that involve a pinky up the ass.”  
  
The voice was sudden and unexpected, and close enough behind them that both Hannah and Sam jumped. “ _Ugh! Josh!!!_ ” Hannah turned around and smacked her brother’s shoulder with a little too much force to be playful. “Don’t _do_ that! And don’t _say_ stuff like that! You’re so gross!”  
  
“Is that the only hello I get? After all I’ve done for you? Ungrateful, that’s what you are,” he turned to Sam, grin wide and self-satisfied. “ _Sammy!_ ” he said in the same way he had since they had first met—slow, deliberate, and drawling, sounding more like ‘Sam-may’ than anything else. “Girl, how you doing?”  
  
“Get _away_ from us, creep!” Hannah groaned, trying (and failing) to shove him away.  
  
“We were waiting on pins and needles for you ladies!” Josh said, entirely unperturbed as he slid an arm around each of their shoulders, leaning forward to rest all of his weight against them. He smirked good-naturedly as he tightened the arm around Hannah into a joke of a chokehold. “Took you long enough to get up here. We were all starting to worry that you got lost. Or froze to death. Or ran off with a yeti.”  
  
“Hi Josh,” Sam said with a laugh, heart slowing back to its usual rhythm.  
  
“Don’t ‘Hi Josh’ him!” Hannah scowled as she wrestled against Josh’s grip, though she found she was unable to squeeze herself out of it. “Why would you _say_ something like that?”  
  
“What? About the yeti? Look Hannah, you’re my little sister and I love you— _dearly_ —but can you really blame me? Your taste in guys is…well, the polite word is ‘bad.’ The _honest_ word is ‘fucked.’ I think you’d be cute with a yeti.” He chuckled to himself, but feigned confusion when Hannah only glared back at him. “Oh wait, did you mean the pinky thing?” He furrowed his brow in mock concern before leaning in closer to her, almost cheek-to-cheek, knocking her glasses slightly askew. “ _Oh!_ Well that’s because, see Hanners, the pinky is the smallest of the fingers—circumference-wise, of course…” as though to illustrate, he held his own pinky up in front of her face, wiggling it slightly. “Which means it’s the easiest to really just… _jam right on up your_ —”  
  
“ _Ugh!_ ” Hannah shoved him again, this time successfully disentangling herself. “Could you _not_ talk like that in front of everyone this weekend, _please?_ ” She frowned and folded her arms across herself.  
  
Josh leaned over to Sam, eyes still on Hannah, “Do you think she means that I shouldn’t be dishing out sweet pinky facts? Or do you think she means the whole fingers up the ass thing?”  
  
“Couldn’t tell ya,” Sam joked, picking up Josh’s hand with her own, undraping his arm from her shoulders before letting it drop. “So where’s the rest of the gang?”  
  
“Guess that depends on the gang you’re talking about.”  
  
Reaching up and fixing the clasp of her hairclip, Sam shot him an impatient look. “Uh, you know. _The gang_. All of them?”  
  
He waved a hand dismissively before folding his arms across his chest and jutting out a hip in a clear mockery of Hannah’s posture. “Gotta be more specific, Sammy. You looking for _Friday Night Lights?_ Or _Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?_ ”  
  
She would’ve asked for _some_ kind of clarification on that— _demanded_ , really—had there not been a sudden movement from just behind Josh. As if on cue, two figures crested the staircase leading up from the first floor.  
  
Josh frowned for a moment at Sam’s sudden silence, but followed her line of sight, turning to glance over his shoulder. His grin returned immediately and he clapped his hands once. “Cameron, babe! What’s happenin’?”  
  
“Seriously dude? _Seriously?_ ” Throwing his arms out to his sides, Chris stopped in the middle of the room. “Why am I _always_ Cameron? I’m funny! I’m charming! I could be Ferris!”  
  
From beside him, Ashley sighed, pursing her lips. “At least you’re not _Sloane_.”  
  
Sam couldn’t help but snicker quietly to herself as they joined up in their typical triangle formation. The three of them cut a less-than-imposing image together. ‘Awkward’ was the word that occurred most when they were around, and it was ‘awkward’ that made itself comfortable at the forefront of her mind as she watched them riff off of one another.  
  
“Look, I don’t make the rules, you guys,” Josh was saying, holding out a hand in a gesture that seemed nearly parental, “Assigning movie character roles to your friends is a sacred art. Do you have _any_ idea how much effort it takes?” He chuckled to himself, “Speaking of, I thought it was movie time down there. Running away for a little breather? Maybe a little…romantic tête-à-tête?” He quirked a brow and deepened his smirk into what was _probably_ an attempt to look suave.  
  
“Yeah, funny thing about that,” Chris started, covertly checking to make sure Ashley was looking elsewhere before unceremoniously flipping Josh the bird. “Movie time sort of became makeout time.”  
  
Josh reeled back dramatically, spreading his hands wide. “Wait…makeout…oh, _oh!_ Oh congrats! Mazel tov! I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the wedding invite in the mail. And now, what, you’re coming up here to rehydrate? You crazy kids and your hormones. Go, dampen your tongues—the beer should be cold by now.”  
  
It was Ashley’s turn to glare, tucking the corners of her mouth inwards in a show of annoyance. She said nothing, but sucked a breath through her teeth reproachfully.  
  
“Yeah, you can tell cuz my lipstick’s all smudged and shit. Let me just fix that in your mirror real qui—no not _us_ , dingus. Emily and Mike. Like _Jesus_. It was _untenable_ , the frigging _noises_ they were mak—” The rest of his sentence was lost, though, as the breath was knocked from him with a low _‘oof!’.  
  
_Ashley pulled her elbow back from Chris’s side quickly, tensely clearing her throat. “Hi Hannah,” she said pointedly, shooting a lightning-quick glance up at Chris before looking back to the others. “Hi Sam.”  
  
To his credit, Chris had the good sense to appear immediately horrified, and he cast his eyes down toward his shoes. “Oh, yeah, hey guys.” He lifted a hand in a half-hearted wave, still avoiding eye contact. “Did not…see you there…” he muttered under his breath. And then, even quieter, “Behind…Josh…”  
  
Of course, the damage was already done. The moment he had said it, Sam had cringed so hard that she had feared imploding. She looked quickly to Hannah, who had already turned away and bustled herself into the kitchen. Turning back to the others, she drooped her shoulders and mouthed an indignant ‘ _Really?!_ ’, getting no reply other than three sheepish shrugs. “You could’ve just said everyone was downstairs,” she said to Josh, lowering her voice to a harsh whisper.  
  
“Well, I could’ve. But I think Cochise did a better job, honestly.” He patted Chris on the shoulder in a show of approval.  
  
“ _Dude_.”

Helpfully, Josh pointed to the staircase. “Everyone’s downstairs, by the way. Movie room, if you didn’t glean that much.”

“You don’t say.” Sam dropped him one last exasperated look before following after Hannah, stepping into the kitchen. For the time being, the counters were almost suspiciously clean, the room smelling vaguely of lemony cleaning products. It wouldn’t last another couple of hours. She peeked into one of the grocery bags Hannah was rifling through and surreptitiously organizing, stifling a groan as she saw the junky contents. “A weekend of beef jerky and kettlecorn, huh?”

“Oh, that’s just snacks.”

For the second time, Sam startled, yanking her hand away from the bag’s edge. She hadn’t realized Ashley had pulled away from the boys until she had spoken up behind her. It was a special talent of Ashley’s, really, being able to blend into the background so easily.

“Oh, sorry! Did I…shoot, I thought I was making more noise than that.” The apples of her cheeks darkened, and she momentarily bared her lower teeth in a grimace. “My bad, sorry Sam.” Her lips tightened into something resembling a sheepish smile as Sam waved it off, and she briskly walked over to the kitchen island and sat on one of the stools, pulling her feet up to rest against one of its rungs. “We stopped by the store on our way up…the fridge is already packed with stuff so that we can actually _cook_ , but there’s also a bunch of frozen things, too, just in case.” Lazily, she looked over her shoulder to where Hannah had flitted, half in and half out of the refrigerator as she pretended to be entirely riveted by the selection of soda. Ashley’s brow creased, Sam noticed, and there seemed to be a flicker of pity in her expression before she turned back. “Oh, but don’t worry—we made sure to get plenty of vegan-y things, too.”

Sam smiled back, though inwardly shuddering. ‘Vegan-y things,’ in her experience, could mean a _lot_ of stuff. Sometimes it actually meant vegan, sometimes it meant organic, but _usually_ it just meant there was a picture of a tree somewhere on the label. “Thanks,” she said all the same, tapping her fingers against the island. Then, louder, trying to draw Hannah’s attention, “Soooooo. What movie are we watching?”

Shrugging, Ashley slowly dropped one of her legs, letting it swing like a pendulum. “Beats me. Everyone was still arguing over it before Chris and I came up. There are _so many_ to choose from.”

“Please tell me it’s not one of Dad’s.” Hannah finally closed the door to the fridge, cracking open a can of ginger ale. She didn’t quite meet Ashley’s gaze, nor Sam’s, but her expression was nothing short of exhausted. “I don’t think I can like…handle looking at everyone’s faces if we watch one of Dad’s. They don’t…ugh, they don’t need to know what he’s like.”

“What, you think they won’t _love_ watching _Blood Monastery?_ ” Sam nudged Hannah with an elbow jovially. “What’s not to love about that?”

“Everything,” Hannah said flatly.

Taking her by the crook of her arm, Sam began leading her back out of the kitchen, nodding towards the staircase. “Then we better get our votes in before Josh and Chris cancel them out.”

“I will _never_ get them,” Ashley sighed from behind them. There was a _click_ , and the lights flicked off, leaving them to navigate the stairs in the half-light. If Ashley took any notice of her mistake, she showed no sign, instead continuing with a sigh, “They’ve watched that stupid movie like… _a hundred_ times, I swear.”

The door to the cinema was wide open as they reached the downstairs landing, and it was then that a murmur of voices could finally be heard, growing louder with each step.

“No! Absolutely _not!_ ”

“What’s the big deal? It’s a good movie!”

“We _said_ no chick flicks. We’re not watching a chick flick.”

“It’s _not_ a chick flick, _Michael_.”

“How is _The Notebook_ not a _chick flick_ , Em?!”

With all the lights on, the cinema looked very much like an extremely comfortable rec room of sorts, full of huge, plush bucket seats, overstuffed beanbag chairs, and even a few well coordinated ottomans to use as footrests. To either side, the walls were decorated with full-size movie posters from Mr. Washington’s extensive collection (most featuring bloody and terrifying faces promoting horror titles Sam had grown familiar with, but had never actually sat down and _watched_ ). It was the gargantuan screen and speaker system that gave away the room’s true purpose, though currently there was nothing being projected.

As they walked in, one of the earlier voices called out. “Oh thank _God_ , finally some _civilized_ human beings. Sam! Hannah! Will you _please_ inform the class that _The Notebook_ isn’t a chick flick?” From where she was, couched low in one of the rows near the front of the room, Emily was little more than a head floating over the back of the seat. She had all but turned around entirely, fixing both of them with a knowingly contemptuous smile.

Next to her, Mike groaned, his arm still stretched across the back of her seat, despite the fact her shoulders were now entirely out of his reach. He didn’t deign to turn himself at all, instead choosing to let his head loll backwards onto the headrest. “It’s. A. Chick. Flick,” he said, punctuating each word with an emphatic chop of his hand.

“It’s a _romantic drama_ ,” Jessica piped in, primly uncrossing and re-crossing her legs. She sat to Emily’s other side, and lifted a hand to finger-wave back to the others. “Just because you don’t understand _romance_ doesn’t mean it’s just some stupid movie.”

“Oh, I understand romance. Don’t I, Em?” he asked, lowering his voice as he turned back to her, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

A gasp, and Emily turned back to him, playfully smacking his shoulder. “You’re _incorrigible!_ ”

“I assure you, dear lady, that I don’t know the meaning of the word.”

Sam grit her teeth as Hannah seemed to shrink beside her, looking down to the floor as she cupped a hand around one of her elbows. _This_ , she wanted to say, _is why I didn’t want you to get your hopes up._ Not that she actually said it aloud (she never _did_ ) but the sentiment hung in the air, all the same.

“That’s not a joke. He really _doesn’t_ know what it means.” Beth had since hoisted herself out of one of the giant beanbags, joining them near the entryway. When she caught Sam’s eye, she winked. “They’ve been going at it like this for an _hour_. Please, kill me now.”

“Nah, Mike’s definitely right.” Matt sat on the floor, flipping through an inordinately huge collection of movies with the concentration of a man trying to defuse a bomb. “It’s definitely a chick flick. My vote’s no on that.”

With the entire group of them talking over each other as they were, the room had the feeling of a hornet’s nest someone had just rudely shaken; there was too much movement, too much chaos, and not a _shred_ of the serenity Sam had been hoping for.

The lights flickered between bright and dim, bright and dim, flashing out a theater’s warning that a show was about to start.

When she turned around, Sam realized the door to the projection room, usually very well camouflaged in the wall, stood open. Chris and Ashley leaned against either side of the doorway like gangly, uncomfortable gargoyles, Chris’s arm hidden as he ostensibly messed with the lights. “Can we make _some_ kind of decision, _please?_ ” he called to the rest of the room, cupping his free hand to his mouth to help his voice carry. “Some of us have popcorn to eat."

Whether it was triggered by the lights or the noise, it was difficult to say, but suddenly Hannah stood up a bit straighter, squaring her shoulders. With a surge of determination none of them had expected, she split off from where she’d been standing with Sam and Beth, sidling her way into the row of seats already partially taken up by the others. Before she could think too hard about what she was doing, she took the empty seat to Mike’s right, managing a nervous, excited smile when he turned to her. “Hey Mike,” she said, hoping the dimmed lights would hide most of her flush.

“Hey Hannah,” he smiled back, voice smooth, but not _interested_ so much as _entertained_. “How you doing?”

Sam felt her stomach drop just slightly as she saw Emily and Jessica pause mid-conversation to watch Hannah take her seat. They turned back to each other with sharp, unreadable smiles—the sort of thing that was immediately recognizable as best-friend-telepathy. Whatever message they had shared, Sam doubted it was of the sweet and understanding variety. She winced as though tasting something sour, hoping that they would keep their snickering to themselves. They were all friends, after all.

But maybe ‘ _friends_ ’ was a bit of a stretch.

Beside her, Beth sighed quietly. “Looks like another weekend of this, huh?” she asked from the side of her mouth.

“Who knows…maybe…maybe things will work out.” Sam could feel Beth’s disbelief radiating from off of her without having to look at her face. “Hannah _said_ she had a good feeling about this weekend. Maybe she’s right. Stranger things have happened.”

“Mhm,” she hummed noncommittally, dropping her arms to her sides before making her way back to the beanbag she’d been sitting in earlier. “They better watch themselves,” Beth said quietly as she passed Sam. “They know the drill, right? Mess with _one_ twin, the other’ll eat ‘em alive.” She jokingly bared her teeth, flexing her fingers like claws.

Laughing quietly, Sam walked alongside her, opting for the beanbags as well, wanting to let Hannah have her time with Mike. “Sorry I can’t help with _that_ one.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, meat is murder, blah blah blah…”

“Well, that, and I’m not too sure anyone here would taste that good.”

“Stringy, probably.”

Before Sam had time to laugh, the projector clicked on at the back of the room, quietly whirring. Everyone grew deathly silent, then, looking to the bright circle of light being projected onto the screen.

“Okay!” Josh called out, immediately riveting the room in that way that he had, holding his hands out to either side. He stood directly in front of the screen, casting a crisp shadow against it. “We are a democracy! We listen to what the people want! And the people have said they do not want chick flicks, so. No chick flicks.” He waved his hands again before anyone could so much as groan, calling for perfect quiet. “We’ve also had recommendations for…” at that, he paused, making a great ordeal of pulling a crumpled piece of paper out of his back pocket and unfolding it. He squinted melodramatically, like an old geezer who’d forgotten their bifocals. “No vampire movies, regardless of how dreamy the main character is! No heartwarming sports movies where the group of loveable misfits wins despite all odds! No movies where the dog dies—oh come on, guys, for real? And lastly…not _Frozen_.” He folded the paper back over, sucking a breath in through his teeth. “Well, I can, in all honesty, say that I agree with at least one of those.”

There were a few laughs from the crowd at that, and Josh’s smirk only widened. If there was one thing that could be said of Josh Washington, it was that the man enjoyed having a captive audience.

“With this in mind! I would like to make my own suggestion—a suggestion, I will point out, that meets _all_ the requirements you lovely people have set forth already.”

“Not _Blood Monastery_.”

In the light, his eyes seemed to catch a spark, glinting brightly. “Not sure _which_ of my sisters that was, but they can _kindly_ shut the fuck up. _Blood Monastery_ is a work of genius, and—”

“Isn’t that the one where the nuns start murdering people?” The sneer was evident in Jessica’s voice. “I don’t want to watch anything _gory!_ ”

There was a general rumble of approval, and Josh threw his arms up. “Firstly, priests. It was _priests_ killing people. Secondly, you people have no culture. No _class_. Wouldn’t know fine cinema if it came out of the ground and bit you on the ass. I hope you all recognize that.”

“Yeah, we’ll live!” Beth snickered, pulling her knees up to her chest as she sank further into her beanbag.

Finally, he gave in, walking over to the comically thick folder of movies Matt had been flipping through, grabbing a disc at random. “ _Fast & Furious_?” he asked the room, spreading his arms out wide once more, not unlike Russell Crowe in _Gladiator_. “Will _that_ entertain you peasants?” He waited for roughly half a second, and when there were no immediate protests, he took a few steps forward. “Hey, Cochise, you know what to do.” Flicking his wrist, he sent the disc flying over the rows of seats, spinning towards the projection room like a frisbee.

“I—oh shit oh shit oh shit…” Chris missed the disc by a country mile, reaching for it just a second too late. It bounced off the wall with a small, unimportant sound, and flew another few inches before falling impotently to the ground. There was a smattering of applause as he had to bend down to grab it, but instead of showing any sign of embarrassment, he favored them all with a sweeping bow and a blown kiss before disappearing into the room to load the movie.

Making herself comfortable, Sam let her eyes fall back to Hannah, who was occasionally leaning over and trying to steal a few seconds of Mike’s attention. She released a slow huff of breath, turning her gaze instead to Josh as he sauntered his way to the very last row of seats, making himself comfortable smack dab in the center-most spot. Ashley tentatively stepped over the back of the chairs, plopping down into the one next to him. Though Sam couldn’t hear what they were whispering about as the screen suddenly burst to life showing the movie’s menu, she could guess well enough as Josh gestured towards the backs of the others. He pantomimed yawning widely and stretching his arms out before pretending to subtly drape one across Ashley’s shoulders. Sam watched as Ashley laughed, momentarily pressing one of her hands to her cheek and batting her eyelashes at Josh. An instant later, she was rolling her eyes, both of their shoulders shaking with titters. As soon as the anti-piracy warnings came onscreen, Chris slid from out of the projection room, hopping over the back of the chairs as well, sitting on Ashley’s other side.

She turned back to the screen, grabbing one of the blankets from the floor and wrapping herself in it. In no time at all, they were all reacting as one unit, laughing and groaning and cheering in turn, and her earlier apprehension melted away.

  
***

**11:15pm**

By the time the party was in full swing a few hours later, Sam was already exhausted. It was some horrible cocktail of school stress, traveling, and cheap rum, she thought, clouding her brain and making everything in the room feel too… _real_.

There was a very loud game of flip cup happening in the kitchen, made all the more loud by the tooth-rotting bubblegum pop Jessica was blasting through the Washington’s speakers. Earlier, there had been attempts to get her to play along too, but she’d laughed and shrugged them off until they’d left her alone. It wasn’t that she didn’t _want_ to play, or that she didn’t _want_ to hang out with the others, but there was a numb sort of ache she’d been nursing since the movie ended and Hannah had continued tagging along with Mike. If anything, she just didn’t want to watch Hannah keep _trying_ , knowing how futile it all was. She also didn’t want to keep pretending she didn’t see the way Emily and Jessica kept whispering behind their hands or cups or slices of pizza. It felt like high school cafeteria drama all over again.

Staring down into the remnants of her plastic cup, Sam suddenly felt way too warm. She tightened her lips and decided she was done for the night, walking back into the brightly lit kitchen just long enough to empty the rest of her drink into the sink. If she’d been worried anyone would try and pull her into the game again, those fears were misplaced; everyone seemed to be moving in some way, all blurs of color and loud voices, but no one so much as looked away from the table when she made her appearance. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Sam exited just as quietly, glad for a sliver of alone time.

The rest of the lodge seemed almost unnaturally still as she wandered through it, casually running her fingers along the banisters or pausing to look at family photos. She’d only been to Blackwood Pines a handful of times since meeting Hannah freshman year, and each time it seemed to feel as though the lodge grew bigger and bigger, the vaulted ceiling of the great room higher with each passing visit. She had crossed the entire first floor before too long, walking in a wide, curving path, and once she made it to the staircase, she paused.

Sam wasn’t _drunk_ , not _exactly_ , but the thought of going up or down the polished, shiny, _slippery_ stairs wasn’t terribly appealing, either way. Instead, seized with her earlier dreams of fresh air, she weaved her way back over to the mat where her boots sat, stepping into them gingerly. Her coat was still hanging in the closet, but she was so _hot_ …She stepped outside before thinking too deeply on it.

Almost immediately, her eyes fluttered shut and she took the deepest breath she was capable of, filling her lungs with the cold, crisp mountain air. When she reopened her eyes, she was met with the startling beauty of the woods. Though the sky was completely black, the lack of lights made each star stand out like a white-hot pinprick, freckling her view with constellations. The storm the weather channel had warned about was still some ways away, the horizon beginning to dim with menacing grey clouds, but the faintest flurry had already started, fat snowflakes lazily drifting down to dust the tree branches. _This_ was what she had come out here for—not ridiculous crush drama, not getting shitfaced, and especially not the questionable food choices—the majesty of the mountain, getting closer to nature.

Leaning against a banister, Sam craned her head to get a better look at the surrounding trees, trying to catch a glimpse of any sign of wildlife. But there were no eyes shining in the darkness, nor were there any howls. But if she strained her ears…

Well that was weird.

Furrowing her brow as if it would help her better make out the sound, Sam leaned even farther forward over the rail. It wasn’t the party inside, and it definitely wasn’t the buzz of any electrical generator the lodge might’ve needed, but it was…familiar.

She glanced over her shoulder to the door, and then, likely due to having just one drink too many, made up her mind to investigate. Carefully, she walked down the icy stairs until she landed on solid ground, well aware that only minutes before, she had decided the _indoor_ stairs were too risky to attempt.

Narrowing her eyes and slowly creeping along the side of the lodge, she followed the strange hum. As she walked, she began to hear something else, as well—a voice. There was a moment where her heart sank, suddenly reminded of an offhanded comment Beth had made earlier about ‘some weirdo hanging around the property lately.’ The memory triggered an awful moment of clarity in her. This was how people got murdered in shitty movies! Was she _really_ the moron who died in the first ten minutes? What did she think she was _doing_ out there in the middle of the woods? Why on Earth was she just wandering around, _alone,_ in the _dark,_ following random noises?

Her only answer was that she was tired. And maybe just a _little_ bit tipsy. The combination of those two facts seemed to make it _imperative_ that she figure out what the sound was. With the lightest footsteps she could manage, she continued on, reaching into her pocket for her phone, just in case.

The humming grew louder and louder in the dark, and as she focused, she picked up on a _new_ sound. Splashing? Her brow knit further. Everything on the mountain was frozen solid…there shouldn’t have been any free-running water. Even the ponds near the lodge had been glassed over with ice, so then what…

Her careful steps weren’t careful enough, apparently, as something brittle snapped under her boot.

“Oh _shit_ ,” came the voice, whispered and frantic.

“Shut up— _shut up!!_ ” came a second.

There was more than one person out there?!

Steeling herself, Sam charged forward, thumb flicking on her phone’s flashlight. She wasn’t sure what she had expected—someone casing the lodge, trying to find a way to break in, maybe—but she was still caught off-guard.

“ _Christ!_ Could you not shine that _directly_ in my eyes?”

“Oh, phew…it’s just Sam.” Ashley had slid down further into the bubbling water of the hot tub at the intrusion, but sat up a bit straighter as she made the realization. She squinted against the phone’s light, raising a hand to shield her eyes. “Hi Sam,” she added, twiddling the fingers of her lifted hand in a half-wave. Her hair was tied up in a little knot at the back of her head, but a few loose tendrils hung wet behind her ears.

“Yeah, hi Sam—again, light is… _directly_ in my eyes. Am I not blind _enough_ for you people?” Chris had both hands covering his face, and only let them drop once Sam toggled her flashlight function off. In the quick glimpse she’d gotten in the light, the lenses of his glasses had seemed entirely fogged over. “ _Thank_ you.”

Josh turned to look over his shoulder, the only one of the three who’d had his back to her. “Busted, huh?” he chuckled, “Well, that sucks.”

Relieved, Sam blew out a deflated raspberry, raking her hands through her hair. She hadn’t even realized the three of them were missing from the kitchen. “Are you guys kidding me? I thought you were like…burglars or something.”

“Burglars,” Josh said, fixing her with a look that was caught somewhere between amusement and disbelief. “Mountaintop burglars.”

“I don’t know!” And then she was laughing, folding her arms across her chest. She could see the hot tub steaming, even in the dark, and the air around them suddenly seemed much, much colder by comparison. “What are you even _doing_ out here?”

“Oh, you know,” Chris said, leaning his head back and closing his eyes as he sank down deeper into the water. “Discussing taxes, considering 401k options, trying to really nail down how to optimize those retirement funds. The usual.”

“We were just trying to get some quiet, that’s all. We figured everyone had, like, _forgotten_ this was out here, so…” Ashley shrugged, shivering at a faint gust of wind, ducking back down until only her head was above the water. “Thought we’d enjoy it before _everyone_ wanted to.”

“Before Mike and Emily started exchanging fluids in it, you mean.” Chris grimaced at the thought.

Sam rolled her eyes, walking up to the edge of the tub and leaning down to test the water with her hand. “They _are_ kind of gross with that, huh?”

“Hey, Shouty McShoutsalot, maybe keep your voice down, huh?” With a flick of his wrist, Josh sent a fine spray of water in Sam’s direction. “The whole plan was _not_ having other people find us. So. If you could join the Whisper Brigade, that’d be…well, it would just be _swell_.” He smiled wide, spreading his arms out along the edge of the tub. “Looks like _you_ needed a little quiet time, huh? A little Sammy Siesta, if you will.”

True though it was, she wasn’t about to admit it. “Maybe I just thought I’d pop out here and check out the stars. We never get skies this clear at home.” She craned her head back, looking up at the sky, but already those grey clouds had crept in on the wind, obscuring the stars and clearly pregnant with snow. She doubted that the storm would be holding off for much longer. “Aaand apparently we don’t get them too clear up here, either. Not for long, anyway. I swear, just a minute ago, I could see _everything._ ”

“Y’know Sammy, if you’re tired of the Peanut Gallery, you’re allowed to say so,” Josh dropped her a knowing wink. “We’re all big boys and girls here, and I think we can all admit that sometimes, uh…sometimes big parties are more fun in _theory_ than they are in practice.”

It was hard to tell over the bubbling of the hot tub, but Sam thought she could almost hear Ashley make a small, contemptuous noise of agreement.

“You wanna join?” Chris asked, mirroring Josh and spreading his arms out over the sides. “Water’s fine. Only downside is…you gotta listen to these two shmucks argue about movies.”

“It’s not _arguing_ if one person is _right_ and the other is _wrong_ ,” Josh said, and something about his tone suggested he was picking up the conversation from where Sam had interrupted. “Then it’s just _education_.”

Across from him, Ashley stuck out her tongue. “For the last time, there’s _more_ to visual storytelling than _just_ shock-value, Josh!”

“If you don’t get a _reaction_ , then it’s not _art_ , Ash!”

“Yelling at a jump scare isn’t even in the same _universe_ as having an actual emotional response!”

“Since when does being scared not count as an emotion?!”

“ _Now_ who’s shouting?” The two silenced immediately, abruptly turning back to face her, and it was Sam’s turn to smirk. “Seriously, you guys don’t have to worry too much about the noise level. They’re…pretty oblivious, in there.” As though to reassure herself, Sam momentarily glanced in the general direction of the kitchen. It was probably just her imagination, but she could’ve sworn she heard distant cheering. “And I don’t think so. I’m not really dressed for the occasion.” She smiled, “I don’t think I even _brought_ a bathing suit. It’s cold as all getout, out here!”  
  
Josh waved her off. “Bathing suit, schmathing suit. _None_ of us brought suits.” He leaned in towards Sam confidentially. “Between you and me, I’m actually naked in here.”  
  
“No he’s not,” Ashley said firmly, offering Sam a tired look.

“No he’s not,” Chris agreed before leaning forward, moving closer to Sam as well, “But _I_ am.”

“They’re _not_.”  
  
“Yeah, I think I’ll leave you guys alone now that I know you’re not gonna burgle the place.” Sam paused, “That really _is_ a fun word to say, isn’t it?” It became very hard not to laugh out loud as all three of the others muttered it to themselves in turn. “You guys enjoy your dorky spa treatment, I guess.”

“Ah,” Chris held up a finger admonishingly, “We are not _dorks_ , madam. We are _nerds_ , thank you.”

“ _You’re_ a nerd,” Ashley mumbled.

“Your _mom’s_ a nerd,” Chris countered without missing a beat.

Josh turned to Chris, “You leave Ash’s mom out of this. She is a fine, upstanding, _bangable_ lady, and I won’t have you besmirching her name.”  
  
“ _Ew!_ Seriously?”

“Your mom is hot, Ash, this is something you’re going to need to come to terms with. Especially once _I_ am your new step-dad.”

She shoved her arms outward, sending a wave of water splashing into his face. “You’re so _sick_.”

Chris angled himself more towards Ashley, “Don’t you talk to your father that way, young lady.”  
  
“ _Step_ -father,” Josh corrected, shaking his head quickly from side to side to get the water out of his eyes.

Sam simply watched them, brow furrowed as the exchange took place. In another strange moment of clarity (not unlike the sort usually triggered by looking into a stranger’s bathroom mirror after a night of drinking), she had the strangest impression that she was seeing them— _really_ seeing them—for the first time. She had known Josh about as well as anyone knew their friend’s siblings, and she’d had a class or two with Chris and Ashley in the past, but up until that very moment, she hadn’t realized how little she actually _knew_ them. They were their own unit, a self-contained group with their own in-jokes and history. Without fully knowing why, the thought warmed the space inside her chest.

“You guys always communicate in skits like that?” she asked, smiling despite herself. “Yeah, well, now I’m definitely gonna say ‘no’ on the joining you thing.” She stood back up, hugging her arms to her chest against the cold. “Oh, but what do you want me to say if anyone asks where you are?” As if on cue, all three looked back to her with matching expressions; _You know better than that_ , those looks said. And she realized she _did._ For all of their ridiculousness, the three were fairly skilled at not being missed. They did their own thing, and, as she thought about it, none of them really regularly hung out with any of the others at the party. The chances of anyone asking where they’d gone were slim to none. Sighing, she laughed again. “What _if_. One of you, at least, has two sisters in there who might come looking for you.”  
  
In another strange show of synchronicity, the three answered in almost perfect unison.

“We took a walk,” Ashley offered with a slight shrug.  
  
“Decided to perform a Satanic ritual in the woods,” Chris said, flashing Sam two quick finger-guns before dropping his arms back into the water.

“Orgy,” came Josh’s curt reply.

There was a moment of silence before they all snickered amongst themselves.

“Okay, okay, no, hang on…we gotta get our story straight, guys. So Sammy…if anyone asks…” Josh tilted his head back up to her. “We took a walk into the woods, where we’re having an orgy as part of a Satanic ritual.”

“No we _aren’t_ ,” Ashley insisted. When Josh shot her a glance, she raised an eyebrow, “You definitely need four or more people for something to be considered an orgy. I think. That…sounds right, doesn’t it?”

Sam had the impression that Josh had been ready to drag Ashley for being a stick-in-the-mud, but at that, he brightened up considerably. “Aw fuck. Hey Sammy, you sure you don’t wanna get in on this, then? Think about it: you could be our number four.” He dropped another salacious wink.

She narrowed her eyes, letting her head tilt to the side in a mockery of contemplation before she pulled her lips up in a humorless smile. “Yeah…no. You guys go ahead without me.”

“Shit guys, you heard her. No orgy.”

Chris gasped loudly, audibly clapping his hands to his face, dragging his fingers down his cheeks. “ _But the ritual!!!_ ”

There was more laughter and another loud splash, but Sam had already turned around and begun the walk back into the lodge. It had been a nice little break from the chaos inside—if not _strange_ —but she thought she was ready to face the group again. She couldn’t keep from smiling to herself, though. At least there were _some_ people having fun together. Maybe if everyone kept being weird, and if Hannah couldn’t let the Mike thing go…well, maybe she’d take them up on their next offer, and join the nerd table for a while.

  
***

**Saturday, February 1, 2014  
12:47am**

There was a rumble of laughter from downstairs loud enough that it could be heard even through the closed door. It was the kind of sound that inspired serious FOMO, suggesting that the rest of the group was having a grand ol’ time as they partied it up in the lodge, but the most it inspired in Ashley was a brief glance towards the floor. She marked the line of her book with a finger, craning her head around to check that the bedroom door was still shut.

It was.

She took the interruption as an opportunity to reposition herself, letting out a slight _‘oomph!’_ of breath as she dropped onto her stomach. The springs of Josh’s mattress groaned slightly as she propped herself up on her elbows, wriggling this way and that to attain peak comfort levels. Once the guys came back and it was time to crash for the night, she’d be relegated to the futon along the far wall, per the usual; however, left to her own devices as she was, she was able to sprawl out however she pleased across the bed. She planned to take _full_ advantage of that.

In a matter of moments, she had been sucked back into the story, the party below her already long forgotten. It was difficult to say how much time passed like that, the combination of Josh’s thick comforter and her warm pajamas lulling her into the early stages of snoozing, the dark mystery of the novel unfolding before her eyes, but she figured it had to be considerable, given how very sleepy she was when interrupted next.

The door clicked shut behind Chris as he walked in. He was mid-yawn, but did nothing to cover it, instead opting to make as much noise with it as he possibly could. “Oh, sorry, are you trying to concentrate?” he joked, flopping down onto the bed beside her. He rolled over onto his stomach to mimic her, and it was only then that he turned to see the expression she was watching him with. “What, am I _unwelcome?_ ”

“You’re half on top of me, you lug.”

“So _move over_.”

“I was here first, _Chris_ ,” she protested, making a point to whine as childishly and nasally as possible.

“And it’s a full-sized bed, _Ash_.”

“Whatever…” Already, though, she was scooting to give him more room, keeping her page marked. “You’re obnoxious…” she muttered as he tossed and turned, purposely making the bed bounce under them. “So much for my me-time, huh? Right out the window.”

Chris laughed, momentarily contorting himself to grab one of Josh’s pillows. “I will be as quiet as a dormouse if you want me to be.” He brought the pillow up to the foot of the bed where they were lying, hugging it under his chest to get more comfortable. “Okay, that’s a lie. I can’t go around making outrageous promises like that.”

“Mhm,” Ashley hummed, leaning over to nudge him affectionately with her shoulder. “Well you better _try_ , because I’m almost done with this chapter, and it’s literally impossible to stop reading mid-chapter.”

“ _Literally?_ Is it _literally_ impossible?”

“I’m _literally_ going to push you onto the floor.”

He gasped loudly, both of them chuckling afterwards. Pulling his glasses off, he pretended to inspect a smudge on one of his lenses until the _exact_ moment Ashley opened the book and lowered her gaze again. “So, what’re we reading, tonight?”

Making no attempts to hide her groan, she tapped at the book’s cover with her index finger, trying to bury her face in the pages.

“Hmm… _Rebecca_ , by… _Daphne du Maurier_ ,” he attempted a French accent as he read the author’s name, and the results were tragic, at best. “I’m gonna make a guess, okay? Gonna test my psychic abilities.”

Quickly realizing that she absolutely was not going to finish the chapter, Ashley lowered the book to the bed again, swiveling her head to meet Chris’s eyes. “Okay,” she sighed expectantly.

He slid his glasses back on and screwed his eyes shut, rubbing at both temples with his fingers. “Hmm… _hmm_ …okay, I think I’m getting a message from the spirit world. The spirits say…”

“Are you supposed to be a psychic or a medium right now?”

“The spirits don’t _like_ being _questioned!_ ”

She snorted a laugh, rolling her eyes. Ashley remained silent besides that, just watching his little show.

Chris’s brow furrowed and his lips tightened into a thin slash. “The spirits are telling me…that you’re reading…a murder mystery…with…with…wait, hold on…ah, yes, I see it clearly now…a lady protagonist who…who… _who_ …oh come on, spirits, don’t let me down…who ends up being romanced by the culprit!” He opened his eyes again and offered her a shit-eating grin. “How’d I do?”

If it was possible for a human face to look _less_ impressed than Ashley’s did at that precise moment, it would’ve been a sight to see. “I don’t _just_ read mysteries, Chris.”

“Uh, yes you do, Ash.” Moving a bit closer, he peered over her shoulder, trying to make out the print. “You’re not answering, which means I’m right. I _am_ , aren’t I? Here, let me…Jesus Christ that’s a tiny font.” Setting his chin on her shoulder, Chris skimmed a few lines, “Hmm…no one’s _talking_ about a murder. But I’m still willing to put money on it being a murder mystery.”

“It’s _not_.” She heaved another weary sigh, shoulders slouching. “Okay, not… _exactly_. It’s more complicated than that.”

“ _Aha!_ Never doubt the spirits. They know their shit. And, per chance, does the main character get romanced by the culprit?”

“Please stop saying _‘romancing_ ,’” she begged with a laugh. “And again, no. Not…not _exactly_. It’s…it’s a complicated thing to explain. Like, yeah, okay, there’s a murder, and there’s a mystery, but it’s not really a _murder mystery_. And there’s a romance, but it’s not…romantic? It’s just…it’s got this foreboding sort of feel to it, and a kind of desperation, almost? And it’s mysterious, yeah, but it’s also really sad, and—” she stopped, feeling Chris’s eyes on her. “What?”

Snickering, he shook his head. “God, you’re a nerd.”

“Because I _read?_ I’m a nerd because I _read?_ That’s what you’re saying to me right now?”

“Did I say that? I don’t think I said that. I may have _suggested_ it, or _implied_ it, but…”

Going entirely boneless, she let her arms flop over the foot of the bed, smashing her face into the mattress in surrender. She felt Chris pull back to keep from falling with her, but he didn’t react otherwise, save to laugh. “You’re like a toddler who _needs_ everyone’s attention.” Ashley turned her head so that she could be heard, though her hair covered most of her face.

“Not _everyone’s_ ,” he argued.

“Just mine, then?”

“Now why do you have to say it like _that?_ ” The flatness of her stare made him laugh again, and he released the pillow just long enough to raise his hands innocently. “I’m serious—okay, I’m done. For real. I will let you finish your chapter.” Chris watched she blew her hair out of her face to show him how high she had raised both eyebrows. “You want me to pinky promise?” When she said nothing, he put his hand out in front of her face, wiggling his pinky temptingly.

For a long moment, Ashley simply stared at his finger, watching him wave it around. Pushing herself back up onto her elbows, she briefly hooked her own pinky around it, shooting him one last reproachful glance. “Fine. Let’s see if you’re physically _capable_ of silence.” She watched him mime zipping his lips shut before leaning in close again, head not quite on her shoulder, but definitely close enough to read what was on the page. Nestling herself back into the comforter, Ashley smiled, needing only a moment of skimming before she found where she’d left off.

There really wasn’t much of the chapter left, but she found it almost infinitely harder to read like that. She told herself that if Chris was _actually_ reading along with her, it wouldn’t be polite to keep going at her usual pace, but that was bullshit and she knew it. No, what had _really_ happened was that she had gotten about a paragraph in before registering how close the two of them were—she could feel Chris’s shoulder against hers, one of his legs against hers, could feel how warm he was. At that moment, it clicked that there was an inch, maybe two, separating them. If he suddenly decided to, all Chris would have to do was turn the tiniest bit, and he could kiss her.

 _Or_ , she realized, _she_ could kiss _him_.

As soon as _that_ scandalous thought occurred to her, a brilliant heat began to creep into her cheeks and needle at the tips of her ears. She swallowed hard around the lump in her throat, pointedly setting the book down as she turned away from him and towards the bedroom door. “Hang on, I just…uh, I thought you were helping Josh find the SNES? What happened with that?” Suddenly, the image of Josh walking through the door and finding them curled up together in his bed bore down on her like a ton of bricks. Ashley felt her face grow even hotter.

Chris pulled back for a second, jarred out of his own thoughts. If she had been looking his way instead of at the door, Ashley might’ve realized that the train of thought she’d interrupted had been _remarkably_ close to her own. He cleared his throat slightly, his mouth feeling particularly dry. “I couldn’t find anything even _close_ to the box he was talking about. He never showed up to help me look through the storage room, so I guess I figured…” he stopped, eyes scanning the room as though he’d only just remembered what he was supposed to be doing. “He would be…up…here…already…” Chris frowned and hefted himself off of the bed, peering around the corner to the alcove where Josh’s closet was. “And he’s…definitely not.”

“He’s definitely not.” Ashley dog-eared her page before setting the book down, dropping her chin into her hands.

Silently, he stalked around the room, eyes narrowed in contemplation. Finally, he paused back in front of the bed, looking down at Ashley. “ _Is he under the bed?_ ” he half-mouthed, half-whispered, pointing down towards the floor with dramatic, jerky movements.

There was no fighting her laughter, even as she rolled her eyes. It was always a relief to go back to joking around when things got…well, when things got _close_ like that. Loath as she was to admit it, it was just easier than dealing with the butterflies swarming her stomach. “ _No_ ,” she stage-whispered back. It didn’t stop him from _immediately_ dropping into a crouch to check, though, and as he flipped the comforter up, he somehow managed to only narrowly miss smacking her in the face with it. “Nice,” Ashley joked, pushing it back to drape over the bed. “Real nice. Did you find him?”

“No.” Chris grunted with the effort of standing back up from his squat, brushing his knees off. “You were right— _as always_. God, he _really_ needs to vacuum under there. Enough dust to bury a body in.” He leaned down, setting his hands against the footboard of Josh’s bed; he realized a second too late how very close that put him to Ashley’s face. He pretended very, _very_ hard not to notice the proximity, or whether _she_ was noticing the proximity. “So…wanna go make sure he’s not lost?”

She primly lifted an eyebrow as she looked up at him, again trying to tamp down the fluttering in her stomach. “Chris, if Josh got lost in his _own family’s vacation home_ , he doesn’t really deserve to be found.”

He feigned shock, wagging a finger in her face. “You’re mean. I hope you know that, Ash. You’re fucking _mean_.”

“Mhm.” She pushed herself up from where she’d been lying, situating herself until she came to rest cross-legged atop the bed. “I’m not gonna go wander through the lodge in the middle of the night. He’ll be back.”

“This is what I’m saying—you’re mean. Do you not care for the welfare of your friend _at all?_ He could be dead,” Chris admonished her. “Or worse, he could be playing spin-the-bottle down there. _Without us_.”

“Wait, wait. Exactly _how_ is that worse than being dead, in your mind?” **  
**

“It’s worse, _Ash_ , because without us down there, that means that, uh…hold up.” He stood back up and lifted both of his hands, lips pulling into a strange shape as he counted off names on his fingers. “Emily, Mike, Jess, Matt, Sam, Hannah, Beth…that means two out of the seven potential kissees are related to him, and honestly? Those are _not_ great odds.”

She sighed even as she began to stand up. “Kissees?”

“Would you have preferred _kiss-cipients?_ ”

Her head lolled back onto her shoulders as she stared up towards the ceiling. No part of her wanted to laugh—laughter only _encouraged_ that sort of terrible behavior—but there was nothing she could do to stop it. “I would _prefer_ that you never say that again.”

“That’s fine, I see how it is. You know, _most_ great artists wander through life unappreciated. Once I’m dead and gone, you’ll regret saying that.” He made a grand show of offering her his hand to help her off the bed, bowing in a manner that was, in his opinion, most gentlemanly, indeed. “You’ll weep over my coffin and be all ‘ _Oh, I should’ve laughed at Chris’s jokes more! I should’ve told him how funny he was all the time, and also how handsome and charming he was! Now he’s dead, and the light of my life is just gone! Whatever will I do, now that the only interesting person in my life is totally done-zo?’_ ”

“Well, for one, I’d get to remember what silence sounded like for the first time in…ever.” Ashley had spent what felt like just a bit _too_ long considering Chris’s hand before she took it, swinging her legs over the bed to stand up. “The second thing I’d do is probably bask in the relief that I wouldn’t have to pity-laugh anymore, honestly.” She paused, “Wait. ‘ _Light of my life?’_ ”

“ _Pity-_ laugh?! Why don’t you just stab me right in the heart, Ash? Just fucking kill me, right here and now. Bury me in the dust trap under Josh’s bed. It’s where I belong.”

She made for the door, turning around just long enough to point accusingly at him. “If anyone down there makes fun of me for being in my pajamas, I _will_ kill you. And I _will_ hide your body under the bed. So remember that you _asked_ for it.”

“Yeah, you in your super embarrassing t-shirt and sweatpants, I’m sure you’ll be the talk of the town.” Chris left the lights on but tugged the door shut behind them, matching stride with her once they were back out in the hallway. “Trust me, I think you’d have to do a lot more than that to get the Mean Girls’ focus off of Hannah.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I’m not trying to _be_ funny! It’s _painful_ to watch. It’s not just me, right?”

Ashley let her fingers dance along the railing as they reached the top of the staircase. “Definitely not just you.”

“I don’t get it. It’s like none of them have ever had it bad for someone who didn’t like them back.” The sentiment hung between them, making the air feel particularly heavy. “ _Anyway_ ,” Chris muttered, clearing his throat, “Time for happy faces.”

They descended the stairs onto the second floor, immediately drawn to the noise filling the great room. The entirety of the huge L-shaped sectional was covered with bodies, some sprawling, some sitting, but all laughing. The coffee table was a mess of opened snack bags and red plastic cups, but it was clear that the craziness was beginning to wind down. It looked like there _had_ been a game of Cards Against Humanity going, judging by the scattered piles of black and white cards on the couch and floor, but it had been forgotten somewhere along the line; now the others were swiping through their phones and occasionally showing the screens to someone else, laughing in that high, raucous way that suggested being overtired. Only Hannah and Sam sat away from the group, having their own quiet talk on the piano bench on the far side of the room. Every so often, Hannah would let her fingers crawl across the keys, and a tiny, tinkling melody would undercut the buzz of conversation.

Chris peered across the room for any sign of Josh. When he found none, he folded his arms across his chest and approached the couch. “Oooh, and what’re we doing here?” he gasped in lieu of a greeting. He bent down to the coffee table and grabbed a handful of chocolate candies from a large dish. Without even looking, he reached his hand behind himself, offering some to Ashley before popping a few in his mouth. “From the way you’re laughing, my guess is you’re going through Beth’s class photos from middle school. My personal fav? Sixth grade.” Once he caught her eye, he flashed Beth a particularly horrible open-mouthed smile and looked distantly off to the side.

Beth shot him a glare that was nothing short of _withering_ , taking an unnecessarily loud drink from her soda’s straw. “At least I’m only ugly _some of the time_ , Hartley.” She stuck her tongue out at him, but her tone was more playful than insulted. Still, she took the time to shove Jessica’s shoulder when the other girl leaned over and giggled.

“We _were_ playing cards,” Matt cut in, “But _someone_ kept throwing theirs when they lost…”

Mike lifted his drink into the air in a toast, Emily curled comfortably up against his side. “Guilty as charged!”

“So we stopped.”

Chris snickered and shook his head, letting Ashley pluck a couple more candies from his hand. “Aw man, and here _we_ were, expecting to join in on the world championships of spin-the-bottle. Or I mean, at _least_ truth-or-dare. You guys aren’t very good at sleepovers, huh? Posers.”

At the mere mention of the games, Jessica and Emily whipped their heads around to give each other gleeful looks. At the precise moment they started to laugh, Beth fixed her stare fully on Chris again, lips tight in poorly restrained frustration. She flipped him off, waving her other hand elaborately to draw attention to it as a game show hostess might.

He grinned and popped the last of the chocolate in his mouth before brandishing two finger-guns at Beth in return. “For real though, any of you guys see Josh come through here? He was supposed to be looking for some video game shit, but we’ve been waiting upstairs for like… _everrrrrr_ ,” he drawled jokingly.

“Mmm, no Josh, huh?” Emily asked. She leaned herself back against Mike, drumming the fingers of her hand absently against his leg as she gave the both of them a quick once-over. “Sure wonder what you two have been up to, all alone upstairs.” She smirked and lifted her drink to her lips, not breaking eye contact for a moment.

“Reading.” Ashley answered curtly, posture going tense. She had already averted her eyes, feeling the others’ stares like red-hot lasers, and she should only _hope_ that her face wasn’t half as flushed as it felt.

Mike snickered at that, lifting both of his hands so that the group could see the air-quotes he made with his fingers. “Ah yes, _reading_. I know _that_ one.”

“Yeah, cool, real funny.” Chris, who _was_ in fact twice as red as Ash’s face felt, quickly turned to Hannah instead, eyes plaintive. “Where might he go looking for video game shit?”

“Um…storage room?” she offered, glancing to Sam briefly. She covered her mouth to hide the fact she was eating as she spoke, “You know, at the end of the hall?”

Becoming increasingly aware of the barbed laughter from the others, Chris tried his best to keep from reacting any further. It was hard, though—it was _real_ fucking hard. “That’s where I was earlier. No-go. Anywhere else?”

That time, she glanced at Beth before shrugging. “Basement? Probably. That’s where Mom and Dad put everything that doesn’t fit in storage.”

“Basement it is. _Thanks_.” He nodded jerkily back towards the stairs, but Ashley was already five steps ahead of him, doing her best to slip away from the group as quickly and quietly as possible. Chris puffed out his cheeks with a huff of a sigh, uncomfortably scratching at the nape of his neck as they made their way down to the first floor. “Ever think _we’ll_ get invited to the popular kids’ table?” he asked humorlessly.

It was difficult to say whether she heard him or not, as Ashley’s only response was a tense, “God, I hate the basement.”

He reached over and lightly patted the back of her shoulder. “ _Everyone_ hates basements, Ash.”

“Yeah, but _I_ hate them the _most_.” They stood framed in the open doorway, looking down the dimly lit stairs, wearing identical expressions of dismay. The lights were already on, from what they could see, suggesting that _someone_ was already down there. Or had been recently. Though she knew it was entirely psychological, Ashley couldn’t help but rub at the chill that had crept its way up her arms. “Josh?” she called down, barely leaning over the threshold. “ _Josh?_ ” she tried again, louder, straining her ears for any reply.

They exchanged a tired look when the only voice that came back to them was a faint echo of her shout.

“I mean…” Chris sighed, “It _is_ a big fucking basement. Think about how big the _lodge_ is, and it pretty much runs under all of it…stands to reason that it’s huge.”

“Sure is.” She grimaced as Chris started descending the stairs, following very closely after him. Thank _God_ she had worn her thickest, fluffiest Christmas socks to sleep in. The thought of walking barefoot through the frigid, cobwebby basement was almost enough to give her a fit. “Remind me _why_ you guys couldn’t just use the stupid Playstation again? It’s already hooked up to the flat screen.”

“I don’t know, it sounded like a good idea at the time! Sometimes you just wanna play EarthBound.” With one last groan, he shook himself out mentally, paying careful attention to each of the concrete steps as they walked down. “Hey, watch it, one of these things is broken in a few spots…”

“Of _course_ it is…”

“Josh? You down here?” Chris took the lead, coughing as he got a lungful of cold, dusty air. “Mother _fuck_ …gonna need to call one of those mesothelioma hotlines after breathing this shit…Josh, come _on_ , bro! This isn’t…” he stopped and turned back to Ash, laughing through his coughs. “Jesus Christ. I _literally_ just almost said ‘This isn’t funny, man!’ Could you _imagine?_ In a creepy basement? How much more cliché could you get?”

That was when the lights cut out. They didn’t flicker, they didn’t dim, they were simply on one second and off the next, plunging them into immediate darkness. Ashley _screamed_ (a good, solid slasher movie shriek if ever there was one), grabbing hold of Chris’s sweatshirt and burying her face into his back without any trace of her earlier embarrassment. Chris swore under his breath, patting his pockets as he tried to remember where he’d put his phone. He grabbed it and fumbled with the lock screen for only a moment.

He let out a relieved breath once he managed to flip his flashlight app on, filling the space in front of them with a faintly bluish light. “Hey, we’re good,” he said gently, reaching back and jiggling Ashley’s arm from where she had glommed onto him, hoping to get her to look up. Slowly, her grip became less constricting, and she chanced a glance from out of the safety of his sweatshirt; when she looked back up and around at him, blinking owlishly, Chris felt his chest thrum with a wave of sympathy. He should’ve gone down there _alone_ , he realized. Sometimes it was just so easy to write off Ashley’s fear of the dark as a quirk of character and not what it _actually_ was—a full-blown phobia. “See? It’s fine! You got your phone?”

A second later, there were two cones of light scanning the basement instead of just the one. The beam from Ashley’s phone was a little shakier than Chris’s, cutting jagged arcs through the blackness as she quickly searched around them. “Oh, _fuck_ this…” her voice was soft, as though it were caught in her throat. “God. _Ugh_. I hate the dark. I _hate_ it I _hate_ it I _haaaate_ it.”

“I know.” Chris realized her free hand had found its way down his arm and into his own, gripping his fingers tightly. He gave it a reassuring squeeze, glad for the cover the darkness provided—it meant she couldn’t see the doofy grin he found himself absolutely unable to suppress. “It’s probably just a short…everyone’s got all the lights and shit on upstairs, Jess has the speakers going, they’ve got the tv on, blah blah blah. I bet if we find the fuse box, we can—”

Something clattered to the floor with an ear-shattering _bang!_ and they both jumped, pulling in simultaneous gasps of surprise.

Ashley let out a pathetic moan, hunching herself closer to Chris. “Oh I don’t _like_ this…” Her voice was little more than a breath displacing the dusty air. She kept shuffling forward as Chris walked, but her breathing was quickly becoming ragged. “This is such _bullshit_ …”

“It’s really not a big deal, Ash…shit falls! Look, like I said, we’ll find the fuse box, get the lights back on, and—”

Somewhere in front of them, something bigger and heavier came crashing down. They whirled towards the source of the sound just in time to see a shadow disappear around a corner, oblong and misshapen.

“Can we go back upstairs?” Her knees were shaking badly enough that she felt she might fall if she took another step. “I think I’d really like to go back upstairs.”

Before Chris had time enough to reassure her that the most frightening thing they were likely to come across was a pile of forgotten clothes donation bags, Josh’s voice caught their attention. It sounded distant and slightly muffled, as though he were behind a wall.

“’Ey, Cochise? Ash? What’re you guys doing dow…what the fuck? _Oh what the FUCK is that?!_ _Shit!_ ” His voice fell off again, punctuated by a loud crashing sound that seemed to come just to their right—much too close for comfort.

“Josh?!” Ash’s beam of light anxiously flicked from one side of the path to the other, her grip on Chris’s hand becoming nothing short of bone-breaking. Her chest rose and fell shakily as she made futile attempts to slow her breathing. When there was no response from the bowels of the basement, she tried again. “ _Josh?_ You better not be messing around! This isn’t—” Frightened as she was, it was obvious she still had enough wherewithal to stop herself before she spat out the words that had been on the tip of her tongue. “Oh my _God_ …I just almost said—”

“See? _See?!_ It’s just…so tempting to say, right?!” Chris directed his own flashlight towards the water heater, brow knitting as a flicker of movement caught his eye.

“ _Oh shit—HELP!_ ”

They exchanged a brief, panicked look before bolting towards his voice, the jostling of their phones making the shadows of the basement’s boxes and fixtures warp unnaturally. When they came across the water heater and its casings, they felt their muscles go rigid

There was something standing just behind it, its silhouette dark as a shadow but entirely unmoving. After a moment of hesitation, one of their flashlight beams slid to it, immediately illuminating the scene.

“Oh ha ha, real funny, Josh.” There was relief in Ashley’s voice, but a slow blooming anger, too, as she came to realize it had been another stupid joke. She rolled her eyes when he didn’t answer, sighing loudly as she stared at his back. “Real spooky. You’re a _master_ of your craft.”

Still no response.

Another prickle of uncertainty began to creep its way down their spines as they watched him standing there, unresponsive, unmoving.

It was Chris who took the first tentative step forward. “…Josh?”

He turned from the wall with one sharp motion, giving them less than a second to process what they were seeing: eyes rolled back in his head, blood gushing from his mouth and onto his chest, head cocked unnaturally to the side. He let out an unearthly shout, another disgusting glut of dark blood spilling from over his lower lip, hitting the concrete floor with a sound like vomit.

They _both_ screamed that time.

There was a clatter as Chris dropped his phone onto the ground, its light juddering out and plunging them back into semi-darkness as Ashley instinctively spun around to escape.

The lights clicked back on just as they had started to realize Josh was _laughing_. As the overhead tubes buzzed back into life, they both watched Josh close the fuse box with a flick of his wrist, shoulders shaking with deep, guffawing laughter. He grinned widely at them, a sight that was grisly, to say the very least. “ _Fuck me,_ I wish I had a camera going for that! Oh…oh God…I actually—guys, for real though? For real? You fell for the fucking _Blair Witch_ bullshit? What the fuck. I thought you were better than that. For shame.”

There were tears streaming down Chris’s cheeks before he could do anything about it, his own relieved laughter so intense that his stomach ached. “Holy _shit_ , fuck you. _Fuck_ you, dude. God _damn_ …” He bent down to pick his phone back up, straightening just in time to return Josh’s high-five. “If my screen’s cracked, _you’re_ fronting the bill, you son of a bitch.”

“ _UGH!_ You guys are such _idiots!_ ” Ashley fumed, shoving Chris away from her with one arm, repeatedly smacking Josh’s shoulder with the other.

Still laughing, Chris raised his hands in self-defense. “Wait, wait, what did _I_ do?” he asked, unable to sound even slightly repentant. “I had _nothing_ to do with this, hand to God!” As proof, he lifted the hand Josh had streaked with fake blood as though delivering a spirited sermon.

“Then why are you _laughing?!_ ”

“Because…because oh my God, that was _objectively_ hilarious.” He guarded himself from another shove, rubbing his phone’s screen against his sweatshirt to clear away some of the dust. “ _Jeeesus_. I _thought_ the whole thing was fucking fishy.”

Ashley groaned again, loudly, before Josh snatched up the hand she’d been batting him with, pulling her close into a bone-crushing bear hug. “Look, Ash, it’s not _my_ fault the two of you dweebs are so easy. And I mean _so_ fuckin’ easy.” He smirked, his teeth streaky with syrupy red goo, “‘ _Oh nooo, help me! Heeelp! What’s going ooon?’_ ” Mimicking his earlier shouts in a wavery falsetto, he laughed again, “Have I taught you fucking _nothing?!_ You don’t go investigating weird voices in basements, that’s Rule Numero-Fucking-Uno. You _turn around_ and you _get help_.” He turned to Chris, waving an accusatory finger, “You should’ve listened to Ash. Probably would’ve saved your life.”

Wriggling out of his grasp as best she could, Ashley pressed her lips so tightly together that they were in distinct danger of disappearing completely. “How did you do that? Are you actually _bleeding?_ ” She reached over and grabbed Josh’s face with one hand, squeezing his cheeks between her thumb and other fingers to try and get a better look at his teeth.

Taking a moment to cross his eyes and further pucker out his lips, Josh let his laughter taper off. “Nah, found a shit-ton of old blood capsules down here.” As proof, he reached down into his pocket, pulling out what almost looked to be a shiny black bullet. “When I say ‘old,’ though, I mean _oooold_. These shits are like _cement_ , blood’s like Jell-o. Here, look,” and without giving her any time to respond, he yanked her closer again, smearing his pursed lips against her cheek in a quick, brutal motion that, to Chris at least, gave the momentary illusion that he was tearing into her face like a Romero zombie.

Ashley certainly yelled as if that was what he was doing, releasing her grip on his face and shoving him away again. When she reached up to her cheek and pulled her hand away, her fingers came back covered in thick gobs of tacky goo. “Ewwwwwww,” she sighed, stamping her feet in a decidedly childish manner before giving in and laughing as well. “That’s so _gross_ ,” she whined, staring down wistfully at her hand, clearly hesitant to wipe it off on her clothes. “Ugh, and it smells so _bad_.”

“You think it _smells_ bad? At least you didn’t have a handful of ‘em in your mouth. This blood tastes like _ass_.”

“Yeah, I’ll take your word on that one,” Chris snickered.

“You’d think the old man would’ve splurged for the good shits,” Josh was saying contemplatively, looking down at the old capsule, turning it over in his fingers. “Unless these fuckers are _literally_ from the 80’s…and don’t get me wrong, they just might be. Nowadays there are gel caps you can get—they melt in your mouth instead of you having to chomp down on them. A lot less work, the actors can actually _talk_ …this is like trying to gnaw through an actual marble.”

“And just how many marbles have you tried to gnaw through, exactly?” Ashley asked.

Holding his hand out, Chris gestured with his fingers. “Lemme see about that, maybe you just have a weak jaw.”  
  
“I have a _weak jaw?_ Uh, have you _looked_ at this face? The Washingtons are _known_ for their strong jaws, Christopher.”

“Just give it, man.”

“These jaws could cut glass and break _bones_ , Christopher.”

“Chris, _ew!_ Don’t put that in your _mouth_!”

“If I had a nickel for every time someone yelled _that_ at me...” He took the blood capsule from Josh and placed it between his molars, proceeding to bite down. When nothing happened, he pulled a face. “…Holy shit, it’s like the world’s oldest Milk Dud,” he said, voice slurred from the foreign object against his tongue. Josh folded his arms across his chest and nodded his head side to side in a juvenile show of ‘I told you so _,_ ’ and Chris tried again, biting down with all his might. There was a sickening squelching noise, and a small stream of gelatinous blood burst from his mouth, running down his chin in a thick gush. “ _Fuck!_ This shit _does_ taste like ass!” he said, spitting the empty capsule to the ground like the shell of a sunflower seed. “Why did you let me _do_ that?”

Rolling her eyes, Ashley reminded him jovially, “I told you not to…”

“Yeah, but you say that about everything, sooo…” He stuck his tongue out to get a better look at the damage, letting out a disgusted laugh as another goopy rush of red-stained saliva came with it. “Fucking _sick_. Man, if this is how much I got out of one, how many did _you_ have to use?"

Josh grinned, his sheepishness clearly feigned, “Like three…or four. God knows the two of you were moving slow enough to give me time to gnaw through a box of them. By the way? That hurt. Next time you think I’m in mortal peril, maybe get the lead out of your boots, huh?” He chuckled. “Still got some more, though, if you want to join the blood club, Ash.” He reached back into his pocket and pulled out a couple more of the capsules, rattling them in his palm enticingly. “Come on, you know you want to. It tastes bad, it looks bad, it _feels_ bad, but can you really go on living without knowing that for yourself?”

As though deep in thought, she set her chin on top of her hand, staring down to the blood caps with laser-like acuity. Her lips pursed from one side to the other, her stance changing as she jutted a hip out and leaned forward to get a closer look. “Hmm…on the one hand…you _both_ told me it’s disgusting. But on the _other_ hand…I could put some dusty old plastic in my mouth and stain my teeth for a week. Oof…decisions, decisions.”

“It’s a hard choice, right?” Chris asked, already in the process of biting through another capsule.

“It’s really not. Now can we go back upstairs, _please?_ I actually almost peed myself. _Legitimately_.” She dropped her head into her hands, still shaking off her earlier nerves. “Did you even _find_ your video game thing?”

Josh’s laughter tapered off and he turned back to Chris with an expression that clearly read ‘oops.’ “Well…shit. See, I knew there was _something_ I was forgetting.”

*******

**1:06pm  
**

“Wait!”

Sam glanced over her shoulder in time to see Hannah scurry towards her, eyebrows drawn together anxiously. “What?”

“You’re not…gonna come too?” she asked, nervously pushing at the frames of her glasses. “Out to the hot tub, I mean?”

She stretched her mouth into what might’ve, ostensibly, been called a smile, shaking her head decidedly. “Uhhh no. Not really my scene, Hannah.”

“Oh come on, _please?_ ” With a frustrated sigh, Hannah rounded on Sam, taking her by the wrists pleadingly. “I don’t want to be out there alone with everyone—”

“You _won’t_ be alone, if everyone’s there,” she laughed, letting her hands go limp as Hannah shook her wrists. “Beth will be out there with you, and you’ll be _fine_. Remember: You guys invited everyone for a reason! We’re all _friends_ here.”

Her expression seemed to sour at that, but she turned and pretended brush a piece of dust from off of her glasses. “Yeah…” Hannah said, voice morose.

“Look,” Sam bent forward, forcing herself back into Hannah’s line of view. “Last night turned out to be fun, didn’t it?”

Shoulders heaving once, she nodded, still avoiding Sam’s eyes.

“So you should believe me when I say it’s going to be _fine_. How can you _not_ get along in a hot tub?” She smiled a warm, comforting grin, wrapping an arm around Hannah’s shoulders in a well practiced side-hug. “And, if _nothing_ else…” she leaned in closer, jokingly scanning her eyes across the great room for any sign of eavesdroppers, “Shirtless Mike, right?”

At that, Hannah _did_ meet her gaze, unable to help but laugh. “Oh my God, Sam.”

“Oh my God, Hannah,” she mimicked, giving her a good squeeze before letting her go. “Go have fun! I’ll want to know all the hot gossip after.” She bumped Hannah with her hip to urge her back towards the door.

“What are you even going to do in here?”

She rolled her eyes comically, giving her a long, pointed look. “What do you _think_ I’m going to do?”

Hannah thought about it for a moment before groaning, looking up to the ceiling with a smile. “If you’re just going to be taking a _bath_ , why can’t you just come soak in the hot tub with us? It’s literally the exact same thing.”

“It’s _nothing_ like that! You know I’m very particular about my baths—”

“I think you mean you’re _particularly weird_ about _the lodge’s bathtub_.”

There was no arguing with that. Sam beamed as she shrugged. “It’s not a trip to Blackwood if I don’t get a bath in. It’s a tradition! You know that!”

“I _do_ know that. You’re so weird.”

“Look who’s talking.”

Waving her off, Hannah grabbed her towel from where she’d draped it over the back of the couch, wrapping it around her waist protectively as she prepared herself to dash out into the cold. “Whatever. Try not to drown in there.”

“I’ll do my very best.” Sam waited until Hannah disappeared out into the lodge’s yard before she made her own slow ascent on the stairs, humming cheerfully under her breath. She made a quick stop in Hannah’s room, grabbing a fresh change of clothes from the bag she’d stashed under the bed, taking a moment to unravel the knot her earbuds had tangled themselves into overnight.

Like she had mentioned to Josh and the others, there was very little about the whole hot tub thing that appealed to her. Sitting around in people-stew, getting buffeted by water jets…it wasn’t really her style. Now, the sprawling, almost Olympic-sized tub in the lodge’s master bathroom? Yeah, _that_ was her jam.

Sam actually sighed a dreamy little sigh as she walked in, dropping her clothes down onto the dressing bench. She closed and locked the door, and the click of the lock was enough in itself to undo a fair amount of the tension she’d been keeping in her shoulders. The manner in which she set about running the tap, slitting the blinds, and lighting the candles around the bath was positively reverent.

She replaced the box of matches in the cabinet she’d found them in, rummaging around through the bottles and bottles of scented soaps before finding what she was looking for (Peppermint Twist, as a matter of fact), snatching it up with a pleased hum. The foam that appeared as she poured a great gob of the soap under the running water was immediate and luxuriously fluffy— _perfect_. Making short work of undressing, she popped her earbuds in, selected her relaxation playlist, and slid herself down into the hot, bubbly water. She let the tap run for another minute or two until her entire body was nearly submerged.

Some people found solace in prayer, others in meditation, but Sam found hers in any bathtub deep enough to cover her knees _and_ boobs. It was one of life’s greatest joys.

The smell of the soap mixed with the light scent of the candles, wisps of steam caught the sunbeams leaking in from the blinds; everything intermingled and coalesced until the room had a dream-like quality about it. The peaceful tinkling of piano keys playing in her ears, Sam allowed herself to sink deeper into the water, closing her eyes. She willed her muscles to loosen, willed her mind to go blank, and it wasn’t very long before she teetered into the cottony place between waking and sleep.

It was difficult to say precisely how much time elapsed with her like that, half-dozing to the lilting tune of sonatas, but when she came back to herself, blinking the sleep from her eyes, a cursory glance told her all she needed to know. She was well and fully pruned. Sam smiled, stifling a monstrous yawn as she sat back up. Checking the time on her phone wasn’t as informative as she’d hoped, given that she hadn’t exactly taken note of when she’d started to snooze, but the water had begun to take a turn towards lukewarm, and that was good enough for her.

The drain was whisper-quiet as she delicately stepped back over the edge of the tub, burying her toes in the plush rug on the floor. She dried off and changed into her clothes, stretching out like a contented cat once she was wrapped up in her warm knit sweater.

It was _amazing_ what a good bath could do for the soul.

A whorl of steam filled the hallway as she stepped out of the bathroom, and Sam took a moment to stop and let the cool air hit her face. There was something unspeakably magical about that tub, she thought again, almost _mystical_ in its ability to soothe aches and relax tension. With a quick flick of her wrist, more muscle memory than anything else, she twisted her hair up against the back of her head and secured it with her clip before stretching her arms out. Quickly, she peeked back into Hannah’s bedroom, poking the door with a finger to open it only a sliver.

Empty.

The others must’ve still been out in the hot tub. She felt her lips tighten at the thought, but tried to push it from her mind. No _way_ was she going to kill the chill she had just achieved. She turned back from the bedroom and padded down the hallway, humming quietly. Pushing through the doorway to get back to the main staircase, she found herself thinking mostly about whether there was anything in the fridge she might be able to eat, or if she’d have to resort to the crushed remains of the old granola bar at the bottom of her backpack. So absorbed in her thoughts, she didn’t realize the approaching shadow until it was too late.

A large, cool hand clamped over her mouth, and Sam immediately sucked in a panicked breath through her nose. Without thinking, she reached up, grabbing the hand with both of hers, making an attempt to wrest it off of her, but the only reward for her trouble was a sharp jerk as she was pulled back against a body.

“Oh my _God_ , will you _relax?_ ”

The whispered voice was familiar. _Too_ familiar. Sam whipped her head to the side to get a better view of her attacker, and was greeted with a shit-eating grin. In a fraction of a second, she went from wide-eyed terror to muted exasperation. Narrowing her eyes and furrowing her brow, she did her best to communicate her anger with only half of her face visible.

Josh snickered, pulling a face of his own before pressing the index finger of his hand—the one _not_ covering her mouth—to his lips. “Wanna see something really and _truly_ pathetic?” he asked, raising one eyebrow, then the other, then waggling both comically.

With no resistance this time, she pulled Josh’s hand off of her face, blowing a tired breath up into her bangs. _Of course_ the dorks would still be lurking around the lodge. They’d already gotten their hot tub time in, after all. The realization made it no less jarring to know that she hadn’t been half as alone as she’d thought. “If that—” Sam rolled her eyes as he shushed her, but complied, lowering her voice to a whisper as well. “If that was an attempt at _flirting_ , I have _such_ bad news for you.”

His laughter tapered off into something a little quieter, but no less amused, and he waved a finger at her like a parent might. “Samantha Marie Giddings, when I flirt with you, you will _know_ it.”

“That’s not my middle name.”

“Do you want to see this or not? It’s _precious_.” When she didn’t immediately respond, save to continue staring at him with annoyance, Josh clasped both of his hands under his chin and widened his smile to show nearly all of his teeth. “What _else_ do you have going on? All the _cool kids_ are still outside.” Even whispering as he was, she could still hear the mockery in the comment.

Again she rolled her eyes, but waved him along, letting him lead the way. She followed, heart rate slowing back to normal as they crept along the upper landing of the staircase to the other hall, tucking themselves into the alcove that looked over the entirety of the great room below. For a moment she fought against a wave of vertigo; in the handful of times she’d been to the lodge, she’d never quite gotten over how upsettingly high up the third floor was. It didn’t help that they were nearly eye-level with the lodge’s chandelier, not to mention the giant, abstract metal sculpture that hung from the ceiling like some strange ball of tangled yarn. Hoping Josh wouldn’t notice, she braced her hands against the railing, trying to look out into middle space instead of focusing on the ground below. It was a trick she had gotten used to when climbing—don’t look down, don’t look up, just keep looking ahead.

Josh, on the other hand, had bent himself over the railing until he all but hung in the open air, forearms crossed atop the bar as he looked down at the room. Nudging her with an elbow, he glanced up quickly to meet her gaze before winking and nodding down to the couch where Chris and Ashley appeared to be totally passed out.  
  
“Aren’t they just… _adorable?_ ” Josh spoke with the tone of a doting grandmother, pressing a hand tightly to his chest before making quiet, dramatic sniffling noises.

When she looked back down, Sam had to admit, there _was_ something adorable about them, asleep as they were. They were near the crook of the L-shaped sectional, Ashley with her head lolling back slightly, open book laying forgotten on her chest, Chris’s legs stretched out along the cushions, a video game controller precariously close to falling out of his half-opened hand as the pause music looped, his head pillowed by Ashley’s shoulder. They were down for the fucking _count_ , it seemed, despite the bright light filtering in through the lodge’s blinds in slits across the length of the room. It was sweet in the way internet videos of baby animals being nursed back to health were sweet. They were adorable, sure, but maybe Josh was right…maybe they were a _little_ pathetic, too.

“Think this is the night?” she asked, letting her own head rest against her shoulder as she mirrored Josh’s posture, leaning against the rails.

He snorted quietly, “What, that one of them grows a pair and makes a move? Please. We got better chances of Mike leaving Emily for Hannah.” After a second of thought, he sucked a breath past his teeth, “Nah, we got better chances of Mike leaving Emily for _me_ , come to think of it.”

“I don’t think you’re really Mike’s type.”

“No? He sure is _mine,_ though. Those muscles? The brooding eyes? The stubble? Please.” He sighed wistfully, resting a cheek atop his fist. “Do you have any idea how ugly those kids are gonna be, Sammy?”

She pulled back, looking up at him with equal parts amusement and disbelief. “Emily’s and Mike’s?”

“What? God no, those babies would be in commercials. Chubby cheeks? Big ol’ eyes? _Gorgeous_ skin? Gerber Babies. Nah, I meant these poor dweebs,” he flicked his hand dismissively towards the couch. “So ugly. So _awkward_. Like baby giraffes, just wobbling around on legs they don’t know how to use. And _pale!_ God, don’t get me started on _pale_. Gonna get sunburn from computer screens.”

Sam laughed under her breath, shaking her head. She knew Josh well enough to recognize it was just good-natured ribbing, but it didn’t stop her from asking her next question. “Not rooting for a big, romantic reveal, then? Musical crescendos and doves flying off into the sunset?”

He swiveled his head towards her, looking up at her through half-lowered eyelids. “Sammy. Sam. Samantha. No one on God’s green Earth is more desperate for those two morons to get it on than me. They don’t even have to date! Just, for the love of _fuck_ , they need to like. Makeout a little. Or _something_. The whole giggly, nervous, sugary sweet, daytime tv, _Boy Meets World,_ back-and-forth bullshit has just got to _end_ , know what I mean?” He popped his eyebrows up and down once, “Pfft, look who I’m talking to. You have to deal with Hanz. You get what I mean.”

“I get what you mean,” she agreed with a nod. There was a moment of silence between them that stretched over the better part of a minute, and then, “They _are_ kind of cute, though.”

“I _do_ know, Sammy. I _know_ , and I _hate_ it,” he said with a grin that proved how very little he actually _did_. “Because even before their genes absolutely fuck over those poor, poor, hypothetical kiddos in the looks department, one way or another, one of _them’s_ getting fucked over in the name department.”  
  
She raised an eyebrow when there was no further elaboration. “…care to explain that one?”  
  
Holding up both pointer fingers, Josh nodded first to the left, “Okay, so let’s say we have Ash…” A quick nod to the right, “Hartley. Ash Hartley. Ashartley. A-shart-ley. Not _ideal_.”

“Oh my God.”

“I _know!_ But no, wait, it gets worse. Because I know what you’re thinking. ‘ _Josh, this is the 21 st century! Maybe _Chris _will take Ash’s name!’_ To which I say to you: Yes, he would do that, but also, Chris Brown.” He looked at her with somber, knowing eyes. “ _Also_ not ideal. Albeit for markedly different reasons.”  
  
She stared at him for what felt like an eternity, but was likely closer to just a few seconds. Sam blinked in tired exasperation before putting her head in her hands. “You are actually out of your mind, and I hope you know that.”  
  
“I know who I am. I’m living in my truth. But my personal journey isn’t why I accosted you in the hall. Are you a betting woman, Samantha Leigh Giddings?”

“That is _also_ not my middle name, and you know I’m not.”

“Again, yes, I _do_ know, but I was _hoping_ maybe you’d lighten up and humor me.”

It was her turn to nudge him, jamming into his arm with her shoulder. “What’re we betting on?”

He bridged his fingers under his chin like a cartoon super-villain, chuckling lowly. “Why, which one of them is more humiliated when they wake up, obvs. Measured by intensity of facial flushing.” Turning to her again, he pursed his lips arrogantly. “That’s what we, in the psychological field, refer to as _operationalizing our measures_.”

“We’re going to stand here and watch them, like _perverts_ , until they wake up?”

Josh contorted his face, “Sammy, you act like you don’t know me _at all_. I am a great many things. An intellectual? Yes. A prodigy? Perhaps. An asshole? Definitely. But a _pervert?_ Never.” Looking back to the couch, he pressed his tongue against the tip of an incisor in contemplation. “Place your bet, please.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Madam, please place your bet.”

Sam rolled her eyes but laughed all the same, “Okay uh…I go Chris. Looks like _he’s_ the one who fell asleep on _her_ … _and_ he’s probably drooling, so he’s gonna freak.”

“Leaving me with Ash. Tsk, tsk, tsk…” he clucked his tongue, “Odds are _always_ on Ash, Sammy.”

“Josh,” she started again, “What’re you going to d—”

But before she had enough time to get the word out, Josh had answered in his own way. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he barked out a sharp, earsplitting “ _HEY!_ ” at the top of his lungs. Below them, the other two reacted immediately, Ashley sitting up quickly enough to send her book clattering to the floor, Chris startling so badly that he, _himself_ , fell off the couch with a dull _thud_.

“Majestic, aren’t they?” he asked Sam flatly, before craning his head over the railing further, beaming down sweetly at them. “Good morning, my darlings! And how did we sleep?”

There was a rumble of confused, disoriented anger from below, both Chris and Ashley simultaneously struggling to wake up and swear up at them. The yells were mostly unintelligible, but the sentiment was clear: _Fuck you_.

“Is this all you do?” Sam asked, turning her head lazily to watch Josh hustle down the stairs. “Jump out and scare each other?”

“Pretty much! Builds character.” He stopped at the base of the stairs, immediately set upon by Ashley, who he effortlessly restrained in a sweeping bear hug. He glanced down at her face, and then over to Chris’s before craning his neck back to call up to Sam. “Hey Sammy? Looks like you were right! Think about what you want your prize to be, yeah? We can settle up later.”

She raised an eyebrow, shaking her head as she watched the three of them, pausing to give a quick wave to Chris as he looked up at her.

“Can we maybe— _maybe_ —go ten minutes without a frigging jump scare?” Ashley asked, her voice muffled as Josh’s hug forced her face against his sweater. He had taken to swaying them gently from side to side as though they were a couple at a middle school dance, but if he had been intending to soothe her ire, he was out of his head.

“How about this. How about _you_ scare _me_ , and then we call it even?” He released his hold on her just slightly, offering a wide, wolfish grin. Josh let go, letting her scamper back to the couch to try and find the page she’d been on before she’d dropped her book. After a moment, he leaned his elbows back against the banister of the stairs, nodding curtly. “All right then, c’mon Hermione, Ron. We got plans, us three.”

There was an accommodating sigh, and then Ashley marked her page and set her book down, zipping her vest up as she went to find her boots. Chris, however, didn’t move from where he’d settled back onto the couch, instead narrowing his eyes and folding his arms over his chest. He looked Josh up and down appraisingly, setting his lips into a harsh line.

Used to this sort of song and dance, Josh returned the stare before setting his hands on his hips. “What? Did you not hear me? Get a move on. Time’s a-wastin’.”

Chris’s eyes narrowed again until they were little more than slits behind the lenses of his glasses. “How… _dare you_ ,” he breathed, drumming his fingers against his arm. “How _dare you_ compare me to Ron Fucking Weasley.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure his middle name is _Bilius_ , you uncultured buffoon. Read a _book_ , Cochise. Tell him, Ash. Tell him to _read_.”

“No. _No!_ I have sat idly by and taken your abuse for too long, man. _Too long!_ I can handle just about anything you throw at me, but _Ron Weasley?_ That’s just cruel. It’s mean, is what it is. Insulting.”

Josh looked to Ashley, gesturing to Chris. “You believe this shit? Would you have preferred _Crabbe and Goyle?_ Cuz that was my second choice, if I’m being honest.”

It was Ashley’s turn to bristle, turning on Chris, too. “Can we just _go?_ I’d really rather not fight over which of us would be Lug Number One and which would be Lug Number Two. I’m happy with Hermione as it is—”

“Of _course_ you are!” Chris whined as she pushed himself up from the couch, slinking off to get his coat and boots. “Hermione’s _great!_ Gets good grades, solves everyone’s problems, probably kissed Krum…Not like fucking _Ron_.”

Sam had only just made it to the landing, watching the three of them mill around as she made herself comfortable on the as-of-then unoccupied sectional. “Wait. I’m sorry…would you have _wanted_ to kiss Krum?”

Chris favored her with an exasperated look. “Famous athlete, broody eyes, accent. Who _wouldn’t_ want to kiss Krum?"

No arguing with _that_ logic.

“Fair point. I guess.” She sat back as the others pulled on their winter gear, but took her time folding her legs under herself and finding the most comfortable spot before prying further. “So…off to have that Satanic orgy in the woods after all?”

“Might as well.”

All four of them looked up at the sound of one of the side doors crashing open, a cacophony of distant voices beginning to fill the lodge. With that last jag of motivation, Chris, Ashley, and Josh all managed to lace up their boots, quickly slipping out through the back door. Chris flashed Sam a quick salute through the glass, and then the three of them were disappearing outside, their footsteps fading quickly.

***

**4:39pm**

“ _There_ you are!”

“Where have you _been?!_ ”

Josh slowed his stride, eyes flicking from Beth to Hannah, both somehow managing to look angrier than the other. He could feel Chris and Ashley drop back a few paces more than he could actually _see_ from his periphery, and it was then that the uncomfortable smile began to tug at the corners of his mouth. For a moment, he toyed with the idea of answering with a smartass quip of the usual variety, but there was something in his sisters’ expressions that told him in no uncertain terms that it would be a mistake. “Guest cabin,” he shrugged. “Was just showing these two the weird shit people’ve been writing in the guest book lately.” He watched them carefully, seeing very little change in their stormy moods. Josh glanced over his shoulder briefly, “Hey. So. This looks like it’s gonna be a sibling thing. Maybe you guys should…?”

“Loud and clear,” Chris said, giving him a bracing pat on the shoulder as he walked past him towards the door.

“Oooh, you’re in _trooouble_ …” Ashley sing-songed, skirting past Josh as well. She gave the twins a wide berth as she joined back up with Chris, arcing around them to slip into the warmth of the lodge again.

Once the door clicked shut, he groaned, running both hands through his hair. “All right, I give up. What’d I do this time?” With the cool acceptance of a man walking to his own hanging, Josh marched up onto the landing to join them, sighing quietly through his nose as Hannah and Beth continued to glare coldly up at him. “You know, when you guys do shit like that, you almost look like the twins from _The Shining_. Can’t say it’s a _great_ look, but—”

“Why does everything have to be a joke, Josh? For real, though!” The embarrassed flushing of Hannah’s face had faded to two dark splotches of color in the pits of her cheeks. “It’s not _funny_ , none of this is _funny!_ ”

 _Oh boy_. He fought the impulse to roll his eyes, quickly realizing the gravity of…whatever it was he had walked back into. “Okay. I’m sorry. Now, can someone please explain to me what all the anger’s about? I literally just took a walk—didn’t realize I had to ask permission.”

It was Beth’s turn to pipe in, arms folded across her chest, all of her weight resting on one hip so that it jutted out in a clear warning of the verbal smack-down she was preparing to lay on him. “Seriously? We tried calling you like a hundred times, but there’s no service. We tried looking for you but you were just _nowhere_ , and when we asked Sam, she just got this _look_ on her face and said ‘the woods.’ Like…what were we supposed to do with that?”

“Why did you _need me?_ ” he asked again, drawing each word out in exasperation. “Did someone _die?_ Did something _break?_ I can’t apologize for fucking up something I’m unaware of.” Something clicked in the back of his mind, and Josh straightened up, serious for a moment. “Was that guy Mom was talking about sneaking around up here again? Did you _see_ him?”

“ _Why_ did you have to invite them?” Hannah whirled on him, arms flying out to her sides, cheeks still brighter than the cold should’ve made them. “It’s not even _fun_ , do you realize that? None of this is fun, and now I just want to go back to school.”

He opened his mouth before shutting it again, taking in a calming breath and counting slowly to five. They’d put the fear of God in him for a second there, but if it was just more of _this_ bullshit, he could deal with it. “Okay…clearly _something_ happened. If I don’t know what it is…I can’t help. You guys _do_ get that, right?”

The girls exchanged a glance that was difficult for him to read, broken only when Hannah let her arms drop down. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket, casting her gaze down and away. “My suit…caught on something in the hot tub.”

Josh stood there, waiting, and when it again became clear that no direct answer was forthcoming, he waved his hand in a curt, circular gesture to try and goad them on. “Oookay? _And?_ ”

Beth rolled her eyes. Hannah kept staring at the ground. He could almost literally see the bulge of her throat as she swallowed. “My top almost came off,” Hannah mumbled.  
  
“Oh. Gross.”  
  
“ _Josh_ ,” Beth cut in sharply.

A cloud of fog formed around him as he blew out a frustrated breath. “Yeah, I get it. That would’ve been _crazy_ embarrassing. It really would’ve. But it _didn’t_ come off, so this feels like a whole lotta energy you two are expending on what would’ve been just a really unfortunate accident—"

“It _wasn’t_ an accident.” Beth spoke deliberately, one corner of her lips tucked in angrily.

He blinked. “It wasn…what, it was _sabotage?_ Jesus Christ, you guys! Shit _happens!_ The world is an imperfect place.”

“All we wanted,” Hannah had started again, sounding alarmingly close to tears, “Was a _fun_ weekend where everyone just _hung out!_ But none of this is fun, Josh! They’ve been doing this shit to me since I _got_ here!”

“Hannah. _Who_ is doing _what?_ ” He looked between the two of them again, shaking his head. “Is this a Mike thing? Could we…can we maybe just _stop_ with the Mike shit? Is that a thing we can agree on?”

“Why did you have to go and invite Emily?” In the blink of an eye, Beth was in his face, poking an admonishing finger into his chest. “You _know_ what she’s like, you _knew_ she was going to be a problem, and now she and Jess are just—”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Josh squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, you are _not_ lecturing a psych major on the ins and outs of group dynamics—I _know_ you’re not doing that. Don’t start conversations you aren’t handled to participate in, Beth.”

“ _You’re_ the one who invited everyone. _You’re_ the one who _asked_ these idiots to be here, so why—”

He lowered his hands from his face, fixing her with an exasperated stare. “Okay. Here’s the thing. Number one, don’t act like the two of you didn’t give me a _very specific_ guest list for this weekend. Please don’t pretend that you weren’t excitedly scribbling down notes in your journals with cute little hearts and swirlies every time someone RSVP’ed, because I know _both_ of you well enough to know that’s _exactly_ what you did.” Both sisters were glaring at him, but he continued anyway, his tone terse, but clearly more tired than angry. “Number two, I’d like to remind you how social politics work. Hannah, my love, you wanted—nay, _needed_ —Mike to be here. Needed it. Well, if you invite Mike somewhere, you need to invite Emily. Sorry, them’s the breaks.” Turning to Beth, he cocked his head to the side thoughtfully, “But let’s say for a second that’s not the case! Well then, Beth, darling, you wanted Jessica here. Well, guess what? If you invite Jess somewhere, you _also_ have to invite Emily! But wait—there’s more! If you invite Mike, Emily, _and_ Jessica somewhere, you gotta invite Matt too. You can’t just invite _part_ of the group, or people get pissed.”

Hannah seemed to consider responding, but then paused, crossing her arms in a reflection of Beth’s posture instead.

“How absolutely _furious_ would you be, Hannah, if Beth and Sammy got invited to a party and _you_ didn’t?” Josh waited only a second for her to answer. When she didn’t, he swept his hands out in front of him like a magician uncovering something wondrous and surprising. “ _There you go!_ When you split the group, people get pissed. And _who_ would they get pissed at? Me. Yeah, see, they’d be pissed at _me_ , because, as you so kindly pointed out, I’m the sap who sent out the invites. Besides, _Christ_ , I thought you were _friends_ with Em, Hannah!”

Her expression darkened noticeably. “I mean…we _were_ , but…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mike. I get it. Always Mike.”

“Don’t be fucking mean!” Beth aimed one well placed shove at his solar plexus, sending him back a step. “You don’t get it. You haven’t been around _at all_ to watch this shit happening. You have _no idea_ what they’ve been like, because _you_ keep running off and being antisocial!”

He rolled his eyes up towards the eaves of the lodge, watching as the snowfall began to grow heavier. “You’re using that word incorrectly.”

“I’m sure you and Chris and Ashley are having a whole lotta fun playing grab-ass away from everyone else, but don’t stand here and act like _we’re_ the ones being unreasonable when you’ve spent all of ten _fucking_ minutes with everyone else, Josh!” **  
**

“Do you want me to go in there and tell everyone to go home? Is that…is _that_ what you want me to do?” Josh cocked his head to the side as he fixed Beth with a pointed stare. “You want me to go climb up on the table, banging some pots and pans together like ‘Hear ye, hear ye! Turns out none of us actually _like_ each other here, so, if everyone could _please_ vacate the fucking premises, that would be most appreciated! Form an orderly queue at the door!’” He bent down slightly to be closer to Beth’s eye level, “What do you _want_ me to do?”

Her eyes narrowed into slits, and she gave him one more good, hard shove. “I want you to spend _five minutes_ thinking about someone other than _yourself_ , for once, you absolute _tool_.” With a loud, frustrated grunt, she briskly turned and all but tore the door off of its hinges.

Josh watched wordlessly as Beth stormed her way back into the lodge, keeping his face stony all the while. Only once the door slammed behind her did he move, turning away from the lodge and sucking a loud breath through his teeth. “That could’ve gone better.” He held a hand out as Hannah made to leave as well, effectively halting her. “Nope, hang on a sec. I’m not done with you yet.”

She huffed, but the wind had clearly been knocked out of her sails. The anger, the embarrassment, the hurt she’d been feeling seemed to have effectively been replaced by something else. Now she just looked uncomfortable, almost unwilling to meet his gaze. “Josh, just forget it…”

Josh crossed the few steps separating them, cupping her face in his hands before jokingly smooshing her cheeks together. “Hannah,” he said slowly, the usual curve of his mouth still strangely serious, “You know I love you, right?”

Hannah averted her eyes, looking up to the snow-covered roof with a quiet groan. “Gross,” she murmured, but made no immediate attempts to escape.

“I _love_ you. And despite popular opinion, I do not, in fact, want you to be upset. I don’t want you to feel bad, and I don’t want your feelings to be hurt, okay?”

She said nothing.

“Do you really want me to say something to someone?” he asked, not particularly excited at the prospect. “Because if you want me to, I can and will go in there and tell people to pull their shit together. I can be very convincing when I want to be.”

Still nothing. **  
**

Sighing, he released his hold on her face, giving her an appraising look. “I’m gonna hit you with some brotherly advice right now, and if you wanna ignore it, then fine, that’s your prerogative. But. Here’s what I know about people. Sometimes…whether you like it or not, you have to just stick to your own kind, you know?” He held up his hand before she could interject, shaking his head brusquely. “I’m not saying this to be a _dick_ , okay? I’m saying it because I’m a little older than you, and I know a thing or two about making seriously shitty life decisions, all right?” At that, she relented, turning her eyes away from him again. “Mike and them? Sure, they’re fine, whatever. They’re all popular and hot and all that teenage dream bullshit, but if you’re more _embarrassed_ around them than you are _happy_ around them, then maybe they’re just…maybe they’re not your people, Han.” He set his hands on her shoulders, giving her one playful shake, “Look, you’re a fucking dork, okay? You didn’t hear that shit from me, but it’s true. The tattoo is cool and all—I mean, who _doesn’t_ like butterflies—but _God_ you’re a freak.”

“ _Josh_ …”

“But I happen to have it on good authority that freaks tend to be the coolest people to hang with. Yes, even freaks like you, I know, it’s a shocking revelation.”

She rolled her eyes again, but the faintest hint of a smile had appeared, replacing her earlier distress.

“There will always, always, _always_ be freaks like you and like me. And they will _always_ have other freaks who’ll put up with their freaky shit. Here’s what I’m saying. You got Beth, you got me, you got Sammy. All objectively pretty cool people who, for whatever reason, like you. And, special buy one, get two deal here—since you got me, I can tell you right here and now that, whether you believe it or not, Chris and Ash? Definitely like you too. So if you’re sick of feeling like everyone else is being an asshole, then fuck ‘em. _We_ can be your wolf pack, Hanners. Consider it.”

Hannah was quiet for a while, fingers absently picking at the faux-fur lining of her pockets. “Thanks.”

“Of course.” Without warning, he palmed her head with one hand, tugging her close enough for him to plant a loud, dry kiss on her forehead. “Now, unless you want to get in another couple minutes of yelling at me, what say we get back into the warm, huh?”

She nodded, following him to the door. As she rubbed away the spot where he’d kissed her, Hannah laughed, and Josh couldn’t help but smile in return.

***

**9:30pm**

When the sun had begun to set, someone floated the idea of a bonfire. It was met immediately with unanimous approval and a mad rush to find as many s’mores ingredients as possible. There was a sizeable fire pit smack dab between the lodge and the woods, encircled by rocks and large, rustic benches that were little more than wooden logs split down the middle.

Glad for yet another excuse to separate themselves from the others, Josh, Chris, and Ashley had made it their job to get the fire going; by the time everyone else made it outside and down the path, it was an impressive blaze. Even with the snow falling and the wind really starting to kick up, the fire was big enough to stave off the worst of the cold.

There had been a tenuous moment when Hannah had seemed to be making some attempt to nab the space next to Mike, only for Jessica to swoop in and drop herself onto the bench daintily. It passed as quickly as it happened, though, and before long, the woods were full of laughter and the echoes of embarrassing stories about classmates.

Only when it got dark—or as dark as it _could_ get, given the snow-bright sky—Josh licked one last smear of melted chocolate from off of his fingers. “All right, people, now for the main attraction.”

“Oh boy,” someone muttered, mouth clearly full of marshmallow.

“Here we go,” sighed someone else.

Beth groaned loudly enough to scare a small group of birds from a nearby tree.

“Oh, fucking bite me,” Josh laughed, momentarily standing up from his bench, nearing the fire. “Welcome…” he said, spreading his arms wide in a slow, dramatic gesture, “To a very _special_ meeting of the Midnight Society.” He reached behind him, scooping up a handful of pine needles before throwing them into the bonfire with a flourish; it resulted in a loud, delicate crescendo of popping noises and Josh’s smile faltered for a second. It hadn’t _quite_ had the intended effect, but he thought it would do.

There was a low, tittering collection of chuckles, then a cough, and then Mike’s voice from across the fire, “Uh…dude, it’s like nine thirty.”  
  
Josh’s expression dropped for the barest of moments as he took inventory of the other’s faces. “It’s…oh my God, can _any_ of you watch a _show?_ Enlighten yourselves, take in some _culture!_ Ugh. _Anyway_.” He hunkered back down onto the bench, elbows on his knees, dangling the bottle in his right hand for emphasis. “Tonight’s story is an oldie but a goodie, kiddies…it’s the story of the Blackwood Sanatorium. Or Sanitarium. Honestly, I don’t know the difference, and I’m not even sure there _is_ one, but I can’t be assed to care.”

Now, instead of laughter, there were groans. From their bench, Hannah and Beth rolled their eyes and Sam dropped her head into her hands. “Not _this_ again,” Beth sighed, rocking herself backwards until she was in danger of falling off entirely. “Let’s _not_ bore everyone to tears, huh?” Though there had been an awkward apology and an even more awkward hug a couple hours back, their earlier argument hadn’t been entirely forgotten, and her voice still carried a bit of an edge.

“Please ignore my sisters, as they have no taste, as can be proven by the company they keep.”

“Or maybe they’re just _scaaaared_.” Chris’s voice was a strange sing-song, warped by the rim of his drink as he took a swig. He only needed to make momentary eye contact with Josh before the two of them were guffawing to themselves, Chris knocking the knuckles of his empty hand against Josh’s when he extended his fist.

A spark seemed to glint in Emily’s eyes just then, completely removed from the bonfire. “Oooh…scared of _what?_ ” she asked, leaning in closer with a smile that seemed anything but well intentioned.

Smirking, Josh looked in the girls’ direction before turning back to Emily. “Ah, ah, ah. While I appreciate your enthusiasm, I really must ask that everyone save their questions until the end.” With another low laugh, he swept an arm out towards the mountain vista, guiding their attention. “Not too far from here, on this very mountain, is the Blackwood Sanatorium-slash-Sanitarium. Or, for those of you who _didn’t_ do so well on the verbal portion of your SATs, the Blackwood Insane Asylum.” He waggled his fingers to emphasize how very, very spooky this was. “Only it didn’t _start out_ that way. See, sanatoriums used to be a big thing, back in the day…they were like spas, sort of. Usually they were built in places with dry air and high altitudes,” another sweeping arm gesture, “With the idea that lots of fresh air and heights would help cure whatever ailed ya, so long as what ailed ya was the good ol’ consumption. Blackwood was built back in 1922 for the fabulously wealthy and beautiful to come and fight off that nasty bout of tuberculosis they caught from Grandmámá…but a quick little history class reminder, the Great Depression was right around the corner, so that whole glamorous rich people thing? Eh, didn’t last.”

“Is the scariest part of this story how boring it is?” Jessica asked, heaving a loud sigh as she twisted a pigtail in her fingers.

Josh let his gaze fall on her. “Madam, you wound me.” He took another drink, bobbling his head in contemplation. “But fine, fine, I’ll fast forward. So like a _lot_ of old health facilities, once the money stopped, shit got rough. _Real_ rough. Now, instead of old fogies coming for fresh air treatments and shit, people have just straight up started dumping their unwanted relatives in Blackwood. Dark shit, right? Essentially, this place goes from being a health retreat to a holding facility for the mentally insane.”

“Not true.”

“Okay, you know what? Do _you guys_ want to tell the story? Because I could just not tell the story, _Beth_.”

She waved her hand, “No, go on. God knows you’ll whine if we don’t let you.”

“Makes you glad to be an only child, huh?” Chris asked Ashley, leaning in her direction though making absolutely no efforts to shield his voice from the others. When he deemed the response from the rest of the group unacceptable, he sighed, carefully setting his bottle down into a nearby snow bank to chill it. He _did_ lower his voice, then, angling himself closer to her. “While he’s doing this boring shit, I’m gonna run back inside for a sec, gonna grab another bag of marshmallows. Need anything?” She shook her head and he pushed himself up, casually walking back towards the lodge. When his back was to the others, he briefly looked to Josh, raising and lowering his eyebrows in some secret sign.

“ _SO!_ ” Josh continued. “With no funds, the doctors are _desperate_ , right? They need money to keep the place up and running. That’s when the head honcho, one Mister Doctor Professor Jefferson Bragg Esquire, the Fourth, has an idea.”

Emily clucked her tongue loudly, cocking her head to the side. “He was a doctor, a professor, _and_ a lawyer?”

“Yes, Emily, he was a very accomplished man, please don’t insult him by questioning his many accolades and achievements. Also, the next person to interrupt me is going _into_ this fire, so help me God. As I was saying…Jeffy Boy has this big moneymaking idea, so sometime in the late 40s, they start experimenting on the patients. Seems like a good way to get some notoriety, and the more publicity they get, the more they contribute to the medical field, the more cashola they’re gonna be able to get their grubby mitts on.

“Shit starts off basic at first. They’re taking blood from healthy patients, putting it into sick patients, seeing if it does anything. It doesn’t, so they gotta move on to bigger, badder things as the years go on. Lobotomies come next—those were _all_ the rage back then, by the way. You got yourself a wicked case of the epilepsy? Lobotomy. Feeling depressed, chum? Lobotomy. The missus isn’t doing what her hubby tells her to? Ohoho, we have a cure for that, friend— _Lobotomy_. Those go about as well as expected. Now you got a hospital full of people with scrambled eggs for brains. A lot easier to handle, though, I’d imagine.” With a flick of his wrist, he sent another handful of pine needles into the fire. “Then, when they realize their plan isn’t working all that well…that’s when the _real_ sadistic shit starts going down.

“They’re doing _Frankenstein_ stunts, now. They’re going down into the morgue—because of-fucking-course they got their own morgue in that place—and they’re taking body parts from corpses. In those days, families dumped you there because they were ashamed, so no one was gonna claim you, and no one was gonna _complain_ if they took your eyeballs and tried transplanting them into wolves.”

There was another loud groan, this time from Sam, who narrowed her eyes in disbelief. “Why would they transplant a _dead person’s eyes_ into a _wolf?!_ That’s just disgusting.”

“I don’t _know_ , Sammy. I wasn’t _there_ , Sammy. Maybe it looked really _cool_ , Sammy.”

“Was the idea that the wolves would see…better?” Ashley asked, also squinting as she looked across the fire to Josh. “Because I’m pretty sure wolves…already see better than we do.”

“They don’t see _color_ , though,” came Matt’s voice, slightly muffled by the mostly-burnt marshmallow he was biting into. “So maybe that was it.”

“Why would they need _wolves_ to be able to see _color?_ ” Emily sneered, snuggling herself closer into the crook of Mike’s arm. “Like what would the _point_ be?”

“Maybe the government was hoping to use them to attack Nazis on sight.”

“Ah yes, Nazis. Known for their bright, colorful plumage. I’m _sure_ that was it, _Michael._ ”

“I mean they had those bright red armbands, Em. Some of ‘em, anyway. Wait, can dogs see red to begin with?”

“ _ENOUGH WITH THE WOLVES!_ ” Everyone fell silent and turned as Josh threw his arms into the air. “Who _cares_ why they needed the eyes—they were putting corpse eyes into animals, and that’s fucking messed up! Jesus, can _no one_ appreciate good storytelling anymore? I swear. May I continue?” He sighed and momentarily hung his head, rubbing the back of his neck before launching back into the story. “They run out of money. Completely.” His tone grew suddenly serious, almost confidential as he bent himself closer to the fire. The light seemed to catch in his eyes, making them all but glow. “But they’ve still got all these patients. Not a lot—not as many as they were _used_ to having…but enough. Enough that they realize they can’t pay to _feed_ these people anymore. So the patients, locked up nice and tight in their little cells…well, they start to starve. All the while, the higher-ups are trying to figure out what to do. They could just let them starve, sure, but the media coverage on that isn’t gonna be _great_. But they don’t have the funds to keep buying them oatmeal and graham crackers, so what’re they to do?” He licked his lips to wet them, letting his eyes scan from one face to the next to the next before taking a slow, deliberate drink. “That’s when Bragg has an idea. A real gold nugget. See, _he_ realized, they did, in fact, have _plenty_ of meat for them to eat. Downstairs. Stacked neatly in cold, refrigerated drawers.”

A few disgusted noises, but the others quickly went quiet once more.

“That’s when the good folks of Blackwood Sanatorium decided they’d kill _three_ birds with one stone: They’d empty out their overfilled morgue, they’d feed their patients, and they’d study what happened to them. Sounds pretty good on paper, right? Tidy, almost. Only here’s the thing, ladies and gents, the human body isn’t really _supposed_ to eat human flesh. Craziest thing. Go figure. For a little while, it seems to be working out all right. No one’s running from the facility screaming _‘Soylent Green is people!’_ so at least in that respect, they’re doing okay. But slowly…slowly, they start to see some _real_ changes in their patients.  
  
“For one, they’re noticing a _lot_ of behavioral weirdness. People are just randomly sobbing or screaming with laughter, or they’re so angry that they’re slamming their heads into the walls just to work out some of the energy. But that’s not _too_ weird…remember, we’re in a mental institution. It’s not until they all stop talking that anyone realizes something really, _really_ wrong is starting to happen. _None_ of them speak, not even a word, not even a grunt. When the nurses and the doctors come around, the patients just stand and stare, wide-eyed, never moving, never opening their mouths. It’s like they’re statues…catatonic. For _weeks_ , it goes on like that. All of them just standing in place, the only part of them to ever move being their eyes…

“And then one night, when doing the usual rounds, one of the nurses, uh…Victoria…Something-Or-Other, she goes in to do a check of her patients. Patient Number One is fine, nothing changed. Patient Number Two is fine. Patient Number Three, though? Oh, Number Three is the problem child that night. She takes their pulse, checks their eyes, and then goes to take their temperature. Puts the thermometer in their mouth. Then, it happens so fast that she doesn’t realize what hit her…or what _bit_ her, I guess…but next thing she knows, Vicky’s missing two fingers.” He lowered the index and middle fingers of his own hand, brandishing it for them all to see. “They’re just _gone_. She’s got these awful, jagged shards of bone coming out from the stumps where they used to be, and there’s blood _everywhere_. She starts screaming right about the time she recognizes the strange crunching sound in the room is the patient yummying-down on her fingers. It’s too late though…by the time backup runs into the hall, Patient Number Three is gums-deep in Vicky’s left leg. It’s a _mess_. Arterial blood spraying, gristle and meat tearing, bone showing through.”

Sam groaned loudly, turning to Hannah and sticking her tongue out in a show of disgust. Hannah returned the gesture, rolling her eyes as Josh kept talking.

“That’s when they realize that the silent wing suddenly isn’t so silent, anymore. No, now the patients— _all of them_ —are screaming this high, horrible wail. Like hungry mountain lions, they’re just _howling_. And then the banging starts. The doctors, the nurses, the security team, it takes them a second to understand what’s happening, but the patients are literally _throwing themselves_ against the doors. The metal is bending, it’s denting, and then impossibly, it’s giving way. They can hear the straining of it over the terrible, twisting screams. Then… _ping!_ A bolt snaps. _Ping!_ A second. _Ping! Ping! Pingpingpingpingping!_ And then it’s like _bullet fire_ , the sound of the metal hinges and screws bending and breaking and falling to the floor, the doors are crashing down where they had been standing and now… _now_ …the patients are free. All of them. And just like Patient Number Three, they’re so…fucking… _hungry_.

“Security’s fucked. They’re the first line of defense, and stupid enough to think that they can hold back a small army of bloodthirsty cannibals. So while the big, strong dudes in white coats are getting themselves thoroughly wrecked, some of the docs and nurses—the smarter ones, anyway—well, they take off running. They figure if they can get out of the patient wing, then they’ll be totally fine. They run and run and run, but even as they do, they can _hear_ what’s happening behind them. They can _hear_ the screams, they can _hear_ the sound of meat being torn off of bones, and worst of all, they can fucking _hear_ the footsteps behind them, getting closer and closer. A few nurses get picked off. Those old fashioned high heels get slippy, after all, so some just fall, and once they fall, that’s all she wrote. The patients just _descend_ on them like starving rats. Some of the older docs get got, too. Just too slow. A hand hooks around the back of a jacket or grabs the chain of a pocket watch, and they’re down for the count.”

A few of them, he noticed, were shifting around uncomfortably as they watched him. Ashley, in particular, had scrunched her knees a little closer to her chest, her fingers anxiously tapping against her plastic cup. She wasn’t a big fan of the guts and gore, Ashley Brown. Ah, but the best was yet to come!

“And with that, we got us a small little group of survivors, now. Maybe five or six. Couple nurses, couple doctors, and the big man himself—Jefferson Bragg. They hole themselves up in Bragg’s office, bar the door, and just… _wait_. Bragg’s got a phone in his office, but this is the 50s, remember, or the late 40s, so a fat lot of good that thing’s gonna do them. The line’s dead, to start with, and then after an hour or two, the lights cut out, too. Maybe someone flipped a switch, maybe someone chewed through the power lines, either way, these poor saps are locked in a tiny, cramped room with no phone, no food, no _power_ , and all they can do is sit and listen to the screams of their fellow employees as they get the skin stripped from them, piece by piece.

“After a long, long time, they start to nod off. It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it—falling asleep in a situation like that? But it happens. Too much stress, too much trauma, and the human brain just sort of needs a reset. Maybe they sleep for a couple minutes, maybe it’s an hour, maybe it’s a whole night, no one’s really sure. What they _do_ know is that all of a sudden, they’re all awake again, and not sure why. But then they hear it.” He paused at that, taking another long, deliberate drink from his bottle.

The air around them fell silent, save for the crackling of the fire. And then, quietly, Jessica’s voice could be heard again. “ _What_ did they hear?”

Slow grin returning, Josh leaned in towards the fire. “Hard to say, exactly…At first, it’s just a quiet scratching, almost like hearing rats on the other side of a wall. But then it gets louder; that’s when they realize it’s _deliberate_. Something…or maybe some _one_ …is on the other side of the office door. The scratching gets louder, and louder, and louder…and then stops. It just…stops.” He held his hands out, fingers fanned out on one, still grasping his bottle in the other. A moment passed, then two, and he had to fight a laugh when he realized how attentively they were all listening to him. “Everything gets very, very, _very_ quiet in the room. No one wants to say anything, no one wants to make a _single sound_ , because whatever’s on the other side of that door…well, it sure isn’t a rat. And more to the point, it sure doesn’t sound like _help._ They all just freeze, staying as still as they possibly can. These are the survivors, remember, and that’s what they want to _continue_ to be— _survivors_. Alive.

“They all look at each other, waiting to see who’s going to be brave enough to make the first move. The noise on the other side of the door is getting louder, and it almost sounds like the wood is starting to splinter. No one gets up, at first. Who can blame ‘em? I know _I_ wouldn’t…but eventually, everyone’s eyes fall on Bragg. He’s the boss, after all, and it was his big idea to start feeding the stiffs downstairs to the patients, so it only seems fair that this is _his_ problem to deal with. It takes him a while, but Jeffy Boy finally does the right thing and stands up. Bragg slowly walks forward to the door. He walks so slowly and so softly, trying not to make a single sound, and when he gets close enough, he reaches for the latch covering the peephole. Carefully—so fucking _carefully_ —he touches it with a finger, and he pushes it away. He leans in, moving closer and closer to the door _terrified_ of what he’s going to see. He puts his eye to the peephole, and he—”

“ _RAGH!_ ”

There was an almost _musical_ chorus of screams from them all as Chris jumped out from behind Sam and Hannah—who, even though they had been _fully_ expecting that particular breed of ass-hattery, found themselves yelling. Instinctively, Hannah whirled around, blindly lashing out in Chris’s direction. She missed by a good bit, managing to do little more than bop him on the side of the neck, but Chris coughed and spluttered as if she’d stabbed him.

“Jesus _fuck_ , Hannah!” Laughter rang out in Chris’s voice, even as he feigned agony, cupping both hands to his neck and rubbing where she had hit him, “You could’ve knocked my freaking head off, oh my _God_.”

“Ha ha,” Sam drawled, rolling her eyes in his direction. “ _Hi_ -larious, you guys. For real. What are we, fifth graders?”

Entirely unaffected by the angry grumbling coming from the others, Josh and Chris nearly collapsed into a fit of laughter, Josh _literally_ slapping his knee, Chris leaning a hand against Josh’s shoulder to steady himself as he walked back to his spot.

“God, that shouldn’t _still_ be so funny…”

“Fuckin’ _right?_ ”

From across the fire, Emily managed a sharp, breathless, “That was _so_ stupid.”

“You guys are _assholes_ ,” Jessica agreed, and she shared a long-suffering look with Emily that seemed to suggest they’d be having their _own_ story time, later.

Chris took his seat again, picking his bottle back up, and pretended to recoil when Ashley smacked his shoulder. “Shoulda seen your _face_.” He pantomimed wide-eyed terror, splaying out his empty hand near his face as he silently screamed. “Don’t worry,” he added, lowering his voice conspiratorially as he leaned in closer to her, “It’s all pretend. Promise. Scout’s honor.”

She scowled, one hand still firmly pressed against the front of her jacket. “You’re such a dolt, oh my _God_.” Once her heart began creeping back down into her chest from her throat, a high-pitched, nervous giggle escaped her. “I think you took ten frigging years off my life with that. _God,_ I hate you guys…”  
  
When Josh was finally able to collect himself, he set his own bottle down, clapping his hands together. “ _So!_ I believe earlier, someone asked what it was that scared my dear sisters and my dear Sammy so badly, last time I told this story. That’s its _own_ story. And a funny one, at that. Okay, so it was a night just like tonight…”

“ _Josh_ …” Hannah said warningly, face still burning hot from the surprise.

“The girly girls over here were having a slumber party on a dark and stormy night, braiding their hair, painting their nails—you know how it goes— _anyway_ , they get bored somewhere between _Titanic_ and _The Proposal_ , and decide they want to be _edgy_. You know, as you do.”

Beth swung her legs back to right herself on the bench, looking out across the sea of faces with an expression of amused exasperation that only those with siblings could ever understand. “Every word out of his mouth is a lie. I have never in my life watched _Titanic_.”

“Oh, you should—very romantic,” Chris confided, looking at her from over the frames of his glasses before snickering again, nudging Josh to continue. Under his breath, he hummed a few bars of _My Heart Will Go On_ until Ashley reached up and pinched his nose, causing him to cough out a strange, choked noise.

“And so they come to me like _‘Oh Josh, tell us a scary story, Josh. We want ghost stories, Josh…’_ So I—being the _primo_ brother that I am…” at this, he paused to take a long drink, “Of _course_ obliged them. I get to the part with Bragg opening the peephole, and _this_ motherfucker right here—” He slapped Chris’s shoulder good-naturedly, “Just _slams_ himself against the outside of the sliding door and shrieks like a goddamn banshee.”

Proudly posturing, Chris took a drink. “Waited out there for fifteen minutes. Got about ninety mosquito bites. Almost died of blood loss. Probably still nursing a case of Lyme. _Worth it_.”

“So they don’t like the Blackwood story.”

Folding her arms tightly across her chest, Hannah burrowed down deeper into the fluff of her jacket, dourly looking down into the fire. “We don’t _like_ the story because it’s _stupid_ and that’s definitely _not_ what happened there.”

Josh shrugged noncommittally, craning his head back to let the chilly air cool him off again. “Prove it. Go up there and ask all the zombie ghosts, yourself, if you don’t believe me.”

“So wait…are they zombies? Or are they ghosts?”

“I thought they were just cannibals?”

“You didn’t say _anything_ about ghosts in that story.”

“Besides,” Josh continued, ignoring the backchat, “It’s not like any of _you_ chumps have anything scarier.”

*******

**11:43pm**

“Okay…you can do this.” Ashley straightened up from the sink, getting a good look at herself in the mirror, and realized with a sinking sensation that she was _significantly_ drunker than she had anticipated. “Oh crap…ugh…you can…still do this.” She took in a deep breath, watching her shoulders rise and fall in the reflection. After a moment, she attempted to find a halfway decent angle at which she could hold her head, trying different smiles along with it. “Not like it’s brain surgery…you just…sit back down, and say… _something_. Just like…‘Hey!’”

“Hey?”

With a shuddering gasp, she whirled around, the earth tilting on its axis and tumbling around her as she tried to keep her balance. She stared goggle-eyed at the door (which she had _apparently_ left open), where Sam and Beth were peeking in, watching her with equal parts amusement and confusion. Immediately her face lit up with brilliant heat, and she wondered how likely it was that the floor would split in two and swallow her up whole. “Oh. Um. Hi.”

“If you’re talking-to-yourself-in-a-bathroom-mirror drunk, you should probably consider moving to the _downstairs_ bathroom,” Beth suggested, disappearing around the doorframe again.

“Um…yeah. Yeah, maybe…” Painfully aware of Sam’s gaze, she looked down to the floor, making her way to the door as quickly as she was able to.

Sam leaned over as she approached, nudging Ashley’s arm gently with her elbow. “You doing okay?”

“Fine,” she said quickly, cheeks burning as she joined them out in the hallway. “It’s nothing. Are, uh…are you guys…having fun?” Ashley winced as it came out of her mouth. It seemed like the right thing to say at a party, but then again, she was never really entirely sure. She reached up and rubbed at the side of her face, hoping against hope that she could get rid of some of the flushing before rejoining the guys.

“Oh, a blast.” Rolling her eyes in Sam’s direction, Beth made her way down the stairs, stopping one she’d reached the first landing, putting them smack-dab between the third and second floors of the lodge. “Watch it, watch it…” she said, spotting Ashley about to slip a solid second before she did, reaching out and grabbing one of her wrists to keep her on her feet. “We should’ve roped the stairs off, I swear to God…”

“Drunk people and freshly-polished wooden stairs—what could _possibly_ go wrong?” Sam laughed, taking hold of Ashley’s other arm and guiding her to the landing as well.  
  
The three of them leaned against the railing, clearly in no real rush to get back to the chaos in the great room; the landing allowed them to look out over nearly all of the second floor of the lodge, and though it was difficult to hear the others’ voices from over the music blasting through the speakers, there was no missing the _reek_ of cheap alcohol in the air. Tomorrow, of course, they would all begin the arduous trip back home, whether that be a university campus or their parents’ houses, and as party law dictated, it was only expected that they go all out before that.

“Uh oh,” Beth said, craning her body until she was almost doubled-over the banister. “Lost visuals on Hannah. This can only spell trouble.”  
  
Sam rolled her eyes but laughed all the same, grabbing a fistful of Beth’s sweater to keep her from losing her footing. “If you fall from up here, you’re going to break your neck and die.”  
  
“Well at least you’ll all have a _very_ exciting story to tell, back at school.” She wriggled a bit, hands clutching at the rail as she scanned the party. “Ah! _There_ she is. Who would’ve guessed—orbiting Mike like a tiny, sweaty comet.” Beth let Sam pull her back onto her heels, shaking her head with a sister’s weary sigh. “She’s so predictable.”  
  
“I don’t get it.” Ashley rested with her cheek against a hand, her other arm folded underneath. She watched the group in the living room with a detached sort of interest that felt much more appropriate for a bio classroom than a party.  
  
“Don’t get _what?_ ” Beth poked her head out over the railing to look around Sam, “Spending the night flitting around your crush?” She hooked her thumbs together and waved her fingers in what was _probably_ supposed to be some imitation of a bird (or, God help her, a butterfly), but ended up just looking like tentacles.  
  
Ashley sighed as she swiveled her gaze to Beth, a crease appearing in her forehead as she ostensibly tried to figure out what she was doing with her hands. “No, I get _that_ —” She froze, mouth still open in a contemplative ‘o’ as she realized what she had just said. Her eyes flicked to Beth’s, and then to Sam’s, and she pursed her lips in resignation when she saw the same knowing, teasing look there. “You know what I meant,” she added, lowering her voice but offering no denials. “What I _was going to say,_ ” she began again, “Is I don’t get how Hannah can like _Mike_ , of all people.”  
  
“Wow Ashley, judgy much?” Sam turned back to watch the party, appraising Mike as he gestured grandly, saying something to Emily that was _just_ too hard to make out over the music. Whatever it was, it must’ve been hilarious, given her reaction. “I don’t know, does it really not make sense? I mean,” she shrugged, “Look at him.”  
  
“Yeah, that’s just it, though— _look at him_.” She had wrinkled up her face as though smelling something unpleasant, shifting her weight to her other foot. “The big, bad, macho deal is just…not what I thought Hannah would be into, I guess.”  
  
As though she could hear them, Hannah happened to glance up, managing a small, perplexed smile. She offered a tentative finger-wave, and the three returned it. “Yeah,” Beth said, blowing her sister an exuberant air-kiss, “I gotta admit, _I_ don’t get what she sees in him. But hey, who’m I to say?”  
  
“She’s just so… _smart_ ,” Ashley continued, aware on some level that this was _not_ a conversation she’d normally have with _anyone_ , much less the two people in the world closest to Hannah, but absolutely and utterly incapable of stopping the words from coming out of her mouth. “And athletic! And pretty. She can do _so_ much better than…” She trailed off, waving dismissively in Mike’s direction.  
  
Sam laughed, “Drunk Ashley has some _opinions_ about Mike, huh?”  
  
“Drunk Ashley doesn’t like _jerks_ ,” she sniffed. “Neither does Sober Ashley, in case you were wondering. Can’t _stand_ the whole…‘alpha male’ thing. It’s gross.”  
  
“ _Yeah_ ,” Beth interrupted, waving an arm grandly towards the kitchen. “Trust me, we caught on to _that_.”  
  
They turned just in time to witness Chris dramatically throw an arm across his forehead and fall back against a stool, narrowly avoiding falling to the floor in the process. “Oh Edward,” he said in an extremely loud, strangely quavering falsetto. “ _Hold me_.”  
  
To which Josh, stoic and unblinking, raised both hands from behind his back, clinking together the empty bottles he’d stuck each of his fingers into. For a moment, he made a show of tenderly caressing Chris’s face, knocking his glasses askew with an errant tap, before broodingly responding, “ _I can’t_.”  
  
Chris made a noise of feminine distress high-pitched enough to be a real threat to the glass in the lodge as he pretended to swoon again, and both Sam and Beth turned back to Ashley with obvious contempt. She bared her teeth in what _could’ve_ been a smile, before dropping her head into her hands.  
  
Realizing they had an audience, Chris and Josh waved up to them, Josh’s fingers still clinking. “It’s Edward Fortyhands!” he called up to them, voice slurred terribly, entirely oblivious to Chris clumsily ducking out of the way of his hand. “Get it?”  
  
Beth cupped her hands around her mouth, yelling over the music, “That’s not even how the scene _goes_ , you morons!” Sighing, she dropped her arms back to her sides, “That’s not even how the scene _goes_.”  
  
There was a loud sigh from Ashley as she pushed herself back up from the railing. “I should make sure they don’t—”

“Do anything stupid?” Sam offered.

She snorted out a tiny laugh. “Think we’re a few _years_ late for that…” Ashley started down the stairs, clutching onto the banister for dear life as she slowly made her way back down towards the others.

It wasn’t long before Sam and Beth saw her reappear, tucking herself comfortably into the stool Chris has only just nearly knocked over. She glanced up to them briefly, raising her plastic cup in their direction before turning back to Chris and Josh, joining in on their animated conversation.

“Oh, they’re _drunk_ ,” Sam commented breezily, fighting back a snort of laughter as Josh went to sit down and missed his stool entirely, tumbling to the floor with all the grace of a newborn giraffe.

“Good. Maybe they’ll be _bearable_ , for once.” Unlike Sam, Beth felt no need to keep from laughing, but was interrupted mid-chuckle by a wide, unavoidable yawn. “Mmm…I think I’m down for the count, though.”

She caught the yawn, covering her mouth with a hand before standing up straighter. “Already?”

“Yeah…think I might just like…go hole up in the screening room for a little. Catch some Z’s in one of those beanbags.” A placid smile spread across her face at the thought. “Yeah, okay, no, that’s definitely what I’m doing. Come get me if anything interesting happens?”

Sam flashed her a double thumbs-up, “You got it.”

They made their way to the second floor before splitting up, Beth rounding the corner to head down to the first floor, Sam instead opting to join up with Hannah.

It was hard for Sam to describe the music Jessica liked. When she really got down to it and tried, the words that seemed to come to her most quickly were ‘loud,’ and ‘shrill,’ and ‘bad.’ The others didn’t seem to mind as much, everyone eating and dancing and climbing up onto furniture they had no business standing on.

She picked up her cup from earlier—the one with a bold, curly S on it—tentatively sniffing its contents before taking a sip to wet her mouth. “Think she takes requests?” Sam asked, leaning in so Hannah could better hear her over the music.

“What, do you not like this song?”

There was no hiding her grimace. “Ugh, does that mean you _like_ it?”

Hannah laughed, saying nothing to confirm or deny the accusation. She held her hands up as if to say ‘What can you do?’ and kept half-swaying to the music, looking around. “I’m so not ready to go back to classes on Monday,” she groaned, letting Sam lean against her as they moved along with the music.

“I hear _that_.”

“Do you think—” It happened quickly enough that Sam was confused for a solid few seconds, simply staring and blinking as Hannah’s eyes widened in shocked surprise, her mouth opening indignantly.

It was when Matt piped in from behind her with an “Oh! Shit, Sam, Hannah…Fuck guys, I’m sorry! My bad, oh man…” that it started to piece together.

She blinked down at her now-empty cup, eyes moving immediately to Hannah’s wet top, realizing belatedly that Matt must’ve bumped into her arm and jostled her. Sam fought the groan threatening to escape her, her eyebrows drawing up and together in concern as she looked apologetically up at Hannah.

Matt, to his credit, appeared genuinely distressed about the spill, apologizing to Hannah profusely. He wasn’t the sort to be antagonistic, so Sam had no doubt that it really _had_ been an accident, but it didn’t do much to lessen the impact.

“It’s fine, it’s fine…” Hannah said, quickly turning away from them and towards the stairs. “Don’t worry about it, I’m just…” her voice was tense. “I’m just gonna go dry off…”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Sam asked, but Hannah was already halfway to the stairs, rushing away before anyone else could see what had happened. She sighed loudly, setting her empty cup down on the table, waving off another of Matt’s apologies with a tired smile.

She made a mental note to pop a couple aspirin before going to bed. Already, she could feel the menacing fingers of a headache beginning to tap at her temples. Sam craned her head back to watch as Hannah disappeared in the direction of her room upstairs. The threat of a headache became more pronounced.

Not unlike the night before, suddenly the music felt too loud, her head felt too swimmy, and it was all just too much. Sam decisively made her way back out of the great room and into the hall, making a beeline for the half-bathroom near the main entrance. There was very little she wanted to do more than tuck herself into a small, quiet space for a moment or two—maybe splash some water on her face or rinse her mouth out.

“Okay, y’got this. You got this. _You_ … _got…this._ ”

So much for finding a quiet space.

But oh, wasn’t this a familiar scene? Sam leaned herself against the open door of the bathroom, folding her arms across her chest as she looked in, watching Chris talking to himself in the mirror. What would Josh have called it? Cinematic parallels? She remained silent, drumming her fingers absently against her sleeve, wondering how long it would take him to notice her.

“Just…say _something_ ,” he was mumbling, lifting one hand from the edge of the sink to run through his hair, making it stand up in strange patches. “Cuz you got this, you _deeeefinitely_ got this…”

“Whatcha got?” she asked, letting her head rest against the door as she grinned into the bathroom.

She had expected to startle him like she had Ashley, but on the contrary, Chris turned to face her with a nonchalance she wasn’t sure she had ever seen in him before. He leaned further against the sink, body nearly at a 90° angle, and it became immediately apparent why he appeared so calm—the boy was drunk _out of his mind_. “Ohey, Sam,” he said, words noticeably running into each other, “Having fun?”

Nodding, she pushed the door open the rest of the way with her foot. “Something like that,” she smiled, standing back up straight. “Are _you_ having fun, Chris?”

“Eh, I’m pretty drunk.”

“I had noticed.” Still, she laughed, unable to remember a time she had _ever_ seen him as inebriated as he was. Tipsy? Sure, she’d seen Chris and Josh tipsy plenty of times, stumbling over themselves and shushing the girls as they snuck back into the Washington house long after they’d been expected, but drunk? _Wasted?_ Fucking _sloshed?_ No, no she couldn’t seem to remember any instances like that. And Chris seemed to be _gone_ , in that regard, leaning against the sink for stability, talking to his reflection, his usual dopey grin somehow even wider. “Whatcha got?”

A crease appeared between his eyebrows, “Huh?”

“A second ago, you were saying you ‘got this,’” she said, nodding towards the mirror. “So…whatcha got?”

He continued to stare for a second, uncomprehending, and then suddenly realization dawned across his face. “ _Oh_ , that. Yeah. I’m, uh…” he cleared his throat and stood up straighter, making a point of tugging his sweater down to smooth out the wrinkles. “ _I’m_ gonna talk to _Ash_.”

Sam raised her eyebrows, “Oh yeah?”

Chris nodded, then seemed to think better of it, pausing and narrowing his eyes to fight back what Sam assumed was a wave of dizziness. “Yeah,” he finally said, though he made no move to leave the sink’s relative safety. “Been thinking ‘bout it. Gonna do it. Gonna…gonna say _something_.”

Oh, she’d believe _that_ when she saw it, but she just kept smiling.

***

**Sunday, February 2, 2014  
1:00am**

The three of them had had… _way_ too much to drink.

It was the reason Josh and Chris were both passed out, dead to the world, hunched over the kitchen island as they snored into their arms; it was the reason Ashley had found herself in the great room with everyone else, laughing and stumbling through a horrible attempt at dancing.

Her saving grace had been that she had never been able to drink on the same level as the guys, and always made sure to stay two or three drinks behind them. Still, she was probably as drunk as she’d ever been, her entire body pleasantly warm, her thoughts pleasantly muffled, her mouth tasting like absolute death.

“Hey Ashley!”

She turned away from Matt, her impromptu but wonderful dance partner, expecting that one of the twins or maybe Sam needed her for something. That wasn’t the case. Ashley stopped swaying, nearly having to suppress a gasp when she found herself eye-to-eye with Jessica, instead. “Hi Jess,” she said, unable to keep the uncertainty from out of her voice. Almost instinctively, she glanced quickly around the room to see whether Emily was anywhere nearby, watching them.

Jessica’s smile was huge and charming, full of perfectly white, perfectly straight teeth, and Ashley could already feel herself beginning to regret feeling any sort of suspicion about her motives. “Hey, so…you guys are like… _super_ into pranks, right?”

Briefly, she looked to Matt, as though for some sort of confirmation. When she turned back to Jessica, she found herself returning the smile. “Oh, yeah! It’s…kind of our thing,” she laughed, punctuating the thought with a weak shrug. “I mean…Josh is the one who’s the best at them, but like…you know.”

Nodding, Jessica reached down and took Ashley’s hands in hers. “You wanna be a part of one of _ours?_ ”

There was another blip of uncertainty, made dull by the buzzing in her head. For a moment, Ashley just looked at Jess, running the math in her head. If they wanted her to be a _part_ of the prank…that meant they weren’t going to pull it on _her_ , right? Jessica wouldn’t _tell her_ about a prank if it was going to be at _her_ expense, would she? Ashley’s brow furrowed as she thought, dimly remembering how many times that weekend _she’d_ been startled or spooked or scared in the name of a good joke.

She squeezed Jessica’s hands in return. “Definitely!”

Jessica beamed.

***

**1:45am**

“Hang on, hang on…”

“Shut _up!_ ”

“Oh my God, will you chill? You’re gonna _love_ this!

“Mmm?”

“Guess who _I_ got?”

“Oh, fun, a guessing game. I can’t wait…wait…seriously? No you did _not!_ ”

“ _Mhm!!!_ ”

“You got _the almosts_ to go along with this?”

Sam paused as she heard the whispering, turning just in time to watch Emily and Jessica walk around the corner.

Jessica beamed, all of her teeth on display. “Well, like… _one_ of them, at least.” She glanced up and caught Sam’s eye, quickly turning back to Emily and giggling before the two of them rushed past her.

She watched them go, narrowing her eyes in confusion before shrugging it off. Sam had made it halfway up the stairs before she realized how eerily quiet the lodge had grown. The music had been turned off, there were no heavy footsteps on the floor, and only the sound of the storm whistling outside broke the silence. A part of her wanted to ignore it and just go to bed; she glanced up towards the third floor landing, having been thinking of nothing besides getting into her pjs and burrowing deep into Hannah’s covers since things had begun to wind down. Still…as much as she had wanted to play it off as though it had been nothing, something about Emily and Jessica’s giggling had set her teeth on edge. She couldn’t say she had ever been fantastic friends with Jessica, but she knew Emily well enough, and when the two of them were grinning like that, usually it meant someone’s feelings were about to get hurt. Badly.

And with the way they had looked at her before scurrying off…well, she hadn’t totally understood what they had meant, but she couldn’t help the uncomfortable suspicion that they had been talking about _her_ in some way.

Shooting another uncertain look up the stairs, Sam bounced on the balls of her feet. She didn’t know why she was pretending—there was no way she was going to be able to go to sleep. Instead, she turned on her heel and descended the stairs again, peering into the kitchen to find a mass of bodies hunched over the island. “What’s, uh…what’s going on here?” she asked.

Three pairs of eyes quickly snapped up to her, and then lowered back to the island. “Hiii Sam…” Jessica said musically, faintly wiggling her hips from side to side as she watched Mike doing… _something_. She lowered her voice, but not nearly enough for Sam to not catch what she said next. “Watch out guys, the Fun Police just arrived…”

She pretended not to hear as she walked up to them, realizing very quickly that, whatever was going on, it was only Mike, Jessica, and Emily who were participating. On either side of the island, Chris and Josh lay snoring, decidedly not part of the planning committee. Neither showed any sign of waking, despite the others’ laughter and proximity, and she had a pretty good inkling that when they _did_ manage to wake up, they would be nursing monstrous hangovers.

“Seriously,” she tried again, “What’s happening?”

“Oh…nothing,” Emily smiled, offering Sam a fetching smile.

“Nothing…at…all…” Mike added dramatically, making a few flourishes with the pen before setting it down to admire his handiwork. As soon as he finished, Jessica and Emily erupted into another fit of laughter, Emily picking up the paper he’d been writing on.

Sam eyed them warily. “Sure doesn’t _sound_ like nothing.”

Rolling her eyes, Emily looked back to her. “Sam, really. It’s nothing _big_. Just a funny little prank.”

“A funny little prank, huh? As in jumping out and scaring someone? Or something more…” she pursed her lips, “ _Involved?_ ”

“Oh, jumping out and scaring, _definitely_.” Jessica bobbled her head up and down as she took the paper from Emily, her grin widening. She reached over and patted Mike’s shoulder proudly, and it was at that precise moment Sam realized something bad was happening.

She held out her hand expectantly. “Can I see?”

The three exchanged secretive looks before Emily nodded, gesturing for Jessica to hand it over.

Cautiously, giving each of their grinning faces a studious once-over, Sam picked up the piece of paper and read it.

_Hannah—_

_You look so damn hot in that shirt…but I bet you’re even better out of it. Come to the guest room at 2:00am ;-)_

_Mike_

_XXX_

Oh.

 _Oh_.  
  
Sam’s brow furrowed, feeling her stomach clench with secondhand embarrassment. Before she could open her mouth to say anything, Jessica had snatched the note back from her, setting it down on the island in as conspicuous a place as she could. “And now…” she said, giving a playful little curtsey. “We wait! Come on!”  
  
“Oh my God…” Emily whispered, her voice filled with laughter. “I can’t believe you actually _did_ this!” Her eyes said something else, though, and she and Jess shared the sort of quick look and momentary giggle that suggested some old in-joke, or at least the strange breed of telepathy bred between friends. She covered her mouth with a hand as Jess shushed her, but it was still evident that her smile faltered for a moment when Sam cut in.

“Don’t you guys think this is a _little bit_ cruel?” she had lowered her voice as well, but hers was a more parental tone—disappointed. “Can’t you just…leave her alone for five minutes?”

“Oh, come on…She _deserves it!_ ” Jessica was hardly dissuaded, setting a hand on her hip as she offered Sam a petulant look.

“It’s not her _fault_ she has a huge crush on Mike.” Whatever humor she might’ve felt that night ago was gone, now. Sam looked quickly to Emily and Mike, her stare withering enough that they both stopped their silent laughter—until she turned back to Jessica, at least.

She shook her head, pigtails bobbing, “Nuh-uh. Hannah’s been making the moves on him all weekend. _I’m_ just looking out for my girl Em.” Jessica flashed Emily a wink, Emily blew her a kiss, and the two began giggling again.

Sam watched the three of them sauntering off towards the staircase, mouth set in a firm line. Jessica and Emily skipped off in front of Mike, turning to go down to the first floor; when she saw Matt and Ashley join up with them, she literally stopped in her tracks, looking at both of them in cool disbelief. “ _Seriously?_ ” she asked through grit teeth, “You guys _too?_ ”

Turning to each other, Matt shrugged noncommittally. Ashley looked back to Sam, spreading her arms out, “It’s just a prank, Sam,” she said with a smile, still more than a little wobbly on her feet.

Sam scoffed and stormed her way up the stairs, shaking her head all the while. “This is just _mean_ ,” she muttered. It was the sort of thing she could—and frankly _did_ —expect from Mike. She could see Jessica doing it, too, and Emily happily going along with it, but Matt and Ashley? Was everyone _really_ so anxious to see Hannah humiliated?

Ashley took a few steps towards her before the room lurched underneath her and she grabbed onto the railing of the staircase. “Sam!” she called, her voice much too loud to be a whisper. “It’s just a _joke!_ It’ll be funny! Come on!"

But Sam was hearing none of it.

She took the stairs two at a time, her socks slipping against the wood once, causing her to grip onto the railings to balance back out. “Hannah?” Sam called once she reached the top of the staircase. “ _Hannah?_ ” There was no way in Hell she was going to let them spoil all the time and energy she had spent keeping Hannah from getting her feelings hurt too badly this weekend. She turned the corner, pushing her way into Hannah’s room. “Han—” she started, only to cut herself short when she realized how empty the room was. “Shit. _Shit_.” Sam whirled back around, sticking her head into the bathroom before going back to the hall, peering over the edge of the railings to make sure she couldn’t see Hannah approaching the kitchen below.

Nothing.

She pulled out her cell phone, meaning to text her a warning, but was immediately reminded of the storm.

 ** _NO SERVICE_** , read the spot where her bars usually were.

Nothing, nothing.

Shoving it back into her pocket, she walked to the other side of the hall, making her way towards the other bedrooms. “Hannah?” Sam called, hearing the echo of her own voice and nothing else.

Nothing, nothing, _nothing_.

The way she saw it, there were two options: Go back downstairs and look for Hannah there, _or_ double-check the rooms lining the corridor. Inwardly, she groaned—either way, she’d have a _lot_ of ground to cover in a short amount of time—but no matter how hard she tried to wrack her memory, she could _not_ remember Hannah coming back downstairs after she’d gone to dry herself off. So she _had_ to be up on the third floor, right? She spent another second agonizing over it before she made her first _real_ mistake of the weekend. Sam entered the hallway and started opening doors to check for Hannah.

Had she been a little less tipsy, maybe Sam would’ve remembered the smaller staircase leading down from the library. Had she decided to go downstairs, she would’ve almost literally bumped into Hannah as she entered the great room from the foyer. Had she _not_ been so angry, she might’ve been able to stop what was about to happen.

***

**1:57am**

“Hey Han, have you seen—” Beth stumbled as Hannah rushed out of the kitchen past her, accidentally knocking their shoulders. “Wow, where _you_ off to, Speed Racer?”

“Uh, tell you later!”

Beth craned her head over her shoulder, watching Hannah disappear towards the staircase. “Whatever, weirdo…” she laughed, stretching out with a wide yawn. The party had officially worn out its welcome in her book, and truth be told, and while her catnap in the cinema had been _exactly_ what the doctor ordered, it had also been a cruel tease. Now, there was nothing she wanted more than to get into bed and sleep like the dead. As her eyes fell on Chris and Josh’s slumped figures, it became apparent that she hadn’t been the _only_ one thinking along those lines.

“How cute…” she cooed mockingly, picking up one of the bottles by Josh and giving it a quick once-over before setting it back down. “Man, I’ll say this for you dorks…you _do_ know how to go all-out.” She made her way over to the counter, trying to determine whether there were any leftovers worth snacking on before crashing for the night.

That was when the note caught Beth’s eye.

She looked over the paper, turning it over once before puffing out a breath that could’ve been a laugh. Beth rolled her eyes as she let the paper flutter back to the counter. “Oh Jesus. Come on, Hannah…” Turning over her shoulder, she gave Josh another look. “You _really_ asleep?” In a few quick steps, she had walked back around the island to Josh, prodding him none-too-gently in the shoulder with her fingers. “Josh,” she tried again, louder, “Are you sleeping?” When there was no response, she bent over, grabbing one of his hands by the index finger, lifting it up off the table a few inches before releasing it. It fell back down with a slap, but Josh didn’t move—and neither did _Chris_ , she noticed, looking back up. With a hefty sigh, she patted Josh’s shoulder. “Gotta hand it to you, brother…you’ve outdone us all once again. Per the usual.”

There was a sudden noise from below her—something like a burst of voices—and Beth jumped, looking down at the floor as though she might suddenly be able to see through it. Had she not been staring so intently at the paneling, she might’ve noticed the sudden pattering of footsteps coming down the stairs. Sam had heard the noise too; even through the floors, it had carried through the vents well enough, cutting through the silence of the lodge like a gunshot.

Then, from the corner of her eye, Beth noticed a flicker of movement. Still startled, she turned just in time to watching something vaguely human-shaped disappear outside one of the lodge’s windows, fading into the snow. “What the…” she started, heart hammering in her chest. The noise from downstairs suddenly became louder, more frantic, and then there were footsteps slamming on the staircase. In the confusion of it all, Beth connected the two, figuring the others had seen the same strange silhouette outside. That was when _Hannah_ ran past the window, cutting through the snow like a bullet. “Oh shit,” she breathed, “Shit shit shit…Josh, Josh come _on_.” She tried rousing him again, grabbing his arm by the elbow, shaking him with all the force she could muster. “You’re _still_ sleeping?! _Ugh! Fuck!_ ” Hurrying from out of the kitchen, she grabbed her coat from off one of the nearby pegs, tugging it over one arm.

When she crossed the threshold and saw _all_ of the others rushing out into the snow, she was seized with the innate sense that something very bad was happening—or had already happened.

“ _Hannah?_ ” Sam called, hands cupped around her mouth. She had been the first to run after Hannah, the first to watch her burst through the doors, and had only had time enough to pull her boots on before following out into the night. Even then, the pause had set her back just a moment too late. Wherever Hannah had run off to, she couldn’t be seen. She turned to see Beth shoulder her way past Mike and Matt, eyes wide with confusion, but face already beginning to twist with anger.

“What’s going on? Where’s Hannah going?” she directed the questions at Sam, but her eyes were over her shoulder, scanning the ground for any sign of footprints.

From behind them, there was an impatient sigh. “Ugh…Beth, it’s fine. Hannah just can’t take a joke…” Jessica said.

“It was just a _prank_ , Han!” Emily called out into the snow, voice full of the sort of malice usually kept quarantined to middle school playgrounds.

At that, Sam watched as Beth’s head snapped around. She fixed an icy stare on Emily, before whirling back around and settling her eyes on each of them, in turn. “What. Did. You. _Do?_ ” She didn’t need to ask the question—she’d seen the note, she’d seen the guilt on their faces, she’d _told_ Josh that inviting these fucks had been a bad call. Beth _knew_ , and when she met Sam’s eyes, she knew she wasn’t the only one.

“We were just…messing around, Beth…” Mike had started to say, reaching for her arm, “It wasn’t _serious_ or anything…”

She twisted her arm away from his brutally, brandishing a finger in his face before turning again, eyes flitting somewhere between Sam and Ashley, face alight with fury and blame. “ _You let this happen?_ ” she asked, brow furrowed. Whirling again so that she was facing the entire group, she began moving backwards, almost jogging, as she spat, “You’re all _jerks_ , you know that?!” Beth turned for the woods, and then began to run in earnest, zipping her jacket up against the brewing storm. “Hannah!” she yelled, voice barely carrying above the wind. “ _Hannah!_ ”

Sam watched until Beth disappeared entirely, reaching up and pressing her palms against her temples. So much for avoiding a scene. She sucked her lower lip into her mouth and gnawed on it anxiously, throat and chest churning with guilt. Hannah had been _sobbing_ when she’d run past her; Beth had been so _angry_. The worst, though, was the sharp echo of her voice replaying in her head: _You let this_ _happen?!_

“Should we, uh…should we go after them?” Mike asked.

“Y’know…I’m pretty sure you’re the _last_ person she wants to see right now, _Mike_ ,” Sam spat, not so much as turning her head to face him.

In the back of the group, Ashley was finding herself sobering up with a horrible speed. She had felt her stomach drop and clench the _second_ Hannah had seen them all, but it was only then, after being frozen by Beth’s furious glare, as she stared down the fading trail of prints the twins had left, that everything fell into place in her head. The woods immediately ceased being the calm, peaceful vista she’d looked out over for the past couple days. Now, they seemed every inch the haunted, hungry forest of a storybook. From off in the distance, something howled. Her head snapped in that direction, her vision wavering with a wave of vertigo, and it felt as though she might simply collapse.

The next moment, she was back in the lodge. She couldn’t remember turning around, couldn’t remember slipping away from the others, but she was already in the great room, stumbling around the railing she’d leaned against earlier. Why had she drank so _much?_ Why had she thought that would be a good _idea?_ _Why had she gone along with the others?!_ Ashley pushed herself off from the railing and staggered into the kitchen, blinking hard as Chris and Josh took shape right where she’d left them, passed the fuck out on the island.  
  
Outside, Jessica was the next to give in. “Ugh, what _ever_. Let them wander around out there, I’m freezing my ass off…Hey Matt? You’re gonna send us that video, right?” She turned on her heel, nose in the air, and Emily followed close after her, the two flouncing back into the lodge, whispering all the while.

“Video?” Sam asked, watching disappear back into the lodge. “Wait, _video?_ What video?” When she turned back around, it was only Mike and Matt that remained. They looked to her, then to each other, and shrugged before returning inside as well. “Cool, guys…” Sam muttered under her breath, looking out to the woods one last time. “ _Really_ cool.” Rubbing her arms against the cold, she stepped back into the house behind the others, taking a moment to flick the switch for the exterior lights. Hannah and Beth would need all the help they could get to find their way back in the dark, after all. Sam paused for a moment as she crossed the threshold into the kitchen, where she found Josh slumped onto the table, still snoring, and Ashley rousing a very bleary, very confused, very _drunk_ Chris from a similar state.  
  
_Wrong move, Ashley_ , she thought to herself. _Wrong move.  
  
_Not that she was _surprised_ —not by a long shot. Ashley having Chris on her side would help soften the blow of explaining the situation to Josh. But of course that wasn’t the _real_ reason she went to Chris first, or the _obvious_ one. And that’s why Sam sighed and kept walking, beginning her journey of turning the lodge into a bright beacon of light the girls would be able to find through the snow. _She_ had actually tried to _stop_ them all from their mean little prank, while Ashley had more than happily gone along with it, so Sam could let _her_ deal with the guys’ reactions, let _her_ explain why it had seemed so funny to torment Hannah at the time.  
  
“It was just supposed to be a _joke_ ,” Ashley was saying, frantic words spilling out of her like vomit, mouth numb and stomach churning. “But then Hannah started running, and Beth went after her, and now—”  
  
“Ash. AshAshAsh…” Still blinking hard and trying to wake himself up, Chris sat with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. The world was spinning around him his and chair, and he had a lingering suspicion if he shifted even the _slightest_ bit, he’d be swallowed by the vortex and spat out somewhere near the cable car station. “Just…one sec, okay? One sec.” He rubbed his eyes before tentatively chancing a glance around the room, perplexed at his inability to see. His eyes just would _not_ focus on anything, turning the fridge and cupboards and Ashley into little more than muted smudges of color, and…when he rubbed his eyes again, he realized he was not, in fact, wearing his glasses. Ah. That would do it. Feeling around the table like Velma Dinkley, he managed to find them through his haze, putting them on and breathing a heavy sigh of relief as the world grew sharp and defined again. “ _What_ about Hannah?”  
  
With his glasses on, it was clear to see that Ashley looked just about as sick as he felt in that moment, eyes wide and worried, face the color of curdled milk. She opened and closed her mouth a couple times before burying her face in her hands, trying to take steadying breaths. “They said it was just going to be a _joke_ …but she was so _upset_ …”  
  
The gravity of the situation had begun to settle in around him, driven home by Ashley’s distress, obvious even in the darkened room. “Hey, _hey_ …” He reached for her arm, missing and swiping at open air once before finding the fabric of her sleeve and gently tugging her closer to the table. “Sit, okay? Sit down and breathe, Ash.”  
  
But she just shook her head, pressing her lips together in a tight line. “Josh is going to be _so mad_ ,” she said quietly, looking to the other side of the table, where he was still out cold.  
  
“Ash,” he tried again, words still heavy on his tongue, “Okay, you gotta…you _gotta_ tell me what happened. But slow, all right? _Slow_. I feel like aliens are trying to eat their way out of my brain through my eyes, ugh…” Had he been more in his right mind, Chris would’ve been mortified to find his hand had found Ashley’s; moreover, had he been more in his right mind, he would’ve noticed how tightly she was squeezing his fingers.  
  
Still, she wouldn’t sit. If she sat, she’d surely puke—or _worse_ , start sobbing. “I don’t know what they told her, they just said it would be a _joke_ , so we went and we hid in the back room—”  
  
“Wait, wait…who’s _they?_ Who’s _we?_ ” Chris was trying to wake himself up, trying to follow the story, but he still felt sleep tugging at the back of his brain, making his thoughts soupy. When he watched Ashley’s eyes flick back towards the living room, it only muddled things further. “Like, Jess and Emily? What were you doing with _them?_ ” he asked, wincing against another stab of pain in his head. It was creeping threateningly close to his migraine spot, and even through the garbled mess of his thoughts, he couldn’t fight the innate sense of _knowing_ that one way or another, tomorrow was going to _suck_.  
  
“Hannah came into the room, and I guess she thought she was meeting Mike? To talk? Or something? And she…” The hand that wasn’t holding Chris’s immediately flew to her face again and she covered her eyes as though trying to shield herself from the thought. Her cheeks and ears and neck felt _hot_ , burning with shame and, sickeningly, secondhand humiliation. “She just…” her hand moved down, gesturing to the front of her vest in a gesture that Chris absolutely could _not_ begin to translate. “And then Emily and Jess started _laughing_ , and Matt had a camera, and Sam was so _mad_ …”  
  
“What?”  
  
“And then she _ran_ into the _woods,_ Chris! Without a _coat!_ ”  
  
“Sam’s in the woods?”  
  
“No! _Hannah!_ ” There was a hitch in Ashley’s voice, a tiny crack threatening to become a break, “And Beth went after her, but it’s really starting to snow, and…” She swallowed hard, looking towards the door the girls had run out of. “They should be back by now, don’t you think? They should be back. Why would they still be out there when it’s so cold?”  
  
He straightened up as best he could, groaning inwardly at a stab of pain from falling asleep in such a strained position. Josh was farther from him than he had expected, and as he reached to smack at his arm, he ended up slapping the table instead. It was enough to send one of the bottles spinning on its side before rolling. Chris and Ashley both winced as it fell to the floor, thick glass cracking, but not shattering. Still, Josh remained asleep. “Aw come _on_ , dude…” Chris sighed. “Josh. _Josh!_ ” He futilely hit the table again, lolling his head back onto his stiff shoulders. “Christ in a canoe…” Easing himself up onto his feet, he leaned further across the table, shaking Josh’s shoulder. “ _Josh!_ ”  
  
“ _What?_ ” From where he lay, arms wrapped around his head, Josh’s muffled voice came through. He sounded groggy, he sounded disoriented, but mostly, he sounded _angry_. Slowly, _very_ slowly, Josh lifted his head, eyes little more than slits as he fought to keep them open. “What the _fuck_ , Cochise? Can’t a lady some fuckin’ _beauty rest?_ ” His mouth wasn’t making the right shapes for his words, and it all tumbled from him in a nearly unintelligible tangle of syllables. “Fuck sake.”  
  
“It was just supposed to be a joke.” It came out in a furious rush, and Ashley felt her entire body begin to burn with shame again. She had been practicing what she’d say in her head, had been trying to find the words, the details that would’ve explained the most while saying the least; she was a writer, after all, it was supposed to be the _one_ thing she was good at. Instead, her mouth was numb, running of its own accord. “I’m so, so _sorry_ , Josh, it was just supposed to be a _joke_ , they said it was just a _joke_ …”  
  
“Oh my _God_ , Ash, shut the f—” Without warning, he sat bolt upright, eyes wide. Josh had precisely five seconds to realize what a grave mistake he’d made that night before he found himself on his feet, lurching to the kitchen sink. The other two stumbled back out of his way, clearing a path to the double-basined sink, and just in time! His body, apparently, had realized something that his mind was not yet capable of processing. He retched once, twice, three times, and proceeded to barf his fucking guts out.  
  
A sympathetic puker by nature, Chris leaned back against the countertop and looked up to the ceiling, trying to take steadying breaths and ignore the terrible, wet sounds from the sink. He felt himself fighting with his own gorge and closed his eyes.  
  
Arms shaking, Josh kept his head hanging over the sink, spitting repeatedly to try and clear his mouth of the awful taste. “Yeah. Thanks…for the wakeup call, guys. Real fine shootin’ there, Tex,” he said, voice tight and shaky in his throat. He felt another warning clench in his lower stomach, and spat again. A few seconds passed, then a few more, and when he felt it safe enough, he swiveled his head to look at them again. “Why. The _everloving fuck_. Did you wake me.” There was a strange, detached quality to his voice that Ashley did not entirely like, and which Chris did not entirely recognize.  
  
Chris looked back to Ashley, eyes imploring, mouth curled in a grimace. “It’s, uh…”  
  
“It was just a _joke_ ,” she said again, feeling the tears rising once more. “I _swear_ , I didn’t think that they would _do_ that! I thought…I don’t know, we were gonna like…jump out and scare her, or just surprise her, or _something_ , because Jess said it was just going to be a funny prank, but…” Then she _was_ crying, from fear, from exhaustion, from dejection. This was _not_ how the weekend was supposed to go…it wasn’t how the _night_ was supposed to go. Chris’s thumb rubbed soothingly back and forth across her knuckles, but she didn’t notice.  
  
Josh’s eyes moved from one to the other jerkily, almost disjointedly, his confusion palpably evident. Had they not just _seen_ him spring up, Chris and Ashley might’ve thought he was sleepwalking. He opened and closed his mouth as though he had thought better of whatever he’d wanted to say, and continued to simply stare at them for a long moment. When he _did_ finally speak, it was to yell “ _Sammy!_ ”  
  
As though on cue, the lights in the kitchen snapped on above them. Chris swore loudly and shielded his eyes like the world’s dorkiest vampire; Ashley jumped at the suddenness of it, casting an anxious glance from one side of the room to the other; Josh flinched and covered his face as well, though his movements were clearly delayed.  
  
Sam stood leaning against the wall, hand still resting near the light switch. “You rang?” she asked, setting her head against the wall as well. She had _wanted_ to be angry, had _wanted_ to return wielding her righteous disappointment like a weighty baseball bat, but as she stood there looking over the three of them, drunk and confused and uncertain, she found she couldn’t quite manage it. Now there was only concern—for the twins, mostly, but for the rest of them as well.  
  
Steadying himself against the countertop, Josh blinked heavily. “Ah yes…good evening, Clarice,” he smirked, his horrendous Hannibal Lecter impression made somehow miraculously _better_ by his slurring. “Would you mind…” he swayed, as though about to fall, “ _Kindly_ telling me what in the blue fuck is going on?”  
  
She exhaled a deep, whooshing sigh. “Why don’t you ask _Ashley?_ She was there. _I_ was just supposed to be damage control—like always.” Sam regretted it as soon as it was out of her mouth. Across the way, Ashley had flinched like Sam had slapped her before dropping her eyes back to the floor. The rational part of her knew the accusation hadn’t been _entirely_ fair…but her stomach was knotted with dread and frustration.  
  
Josh continued to watch her, expression inscrutable. “I don’t _want_ to ask Ash,” he said slowly, words thick and clumsy on his tongue. “She’s _busy_ holding hands with _Chris_.” His speech took on a juvenile, matter-of-fact tone.  
  
Off to the side, Chris and Ashley sprang apart, both immediately finding something innocuous to occupy their hands with.  
  
Not for the first time that night, Sam noted, they _also_ made it a point to avoid each other’s line of sight. An hour ago, she would’ve found it endearing, but just then, she wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them until their stupid heads fell off. She wet her lips with a sliver of her tongue, realizing Josh wasn’t going to be understanding much until he managed to sober up. “Hannah and Beth ran into the woods, Josh. And the storm’s coming in.”  
  
Silence.  
  
Slowly, Josh pointed to the window. “ _Those_ woods?”  
  
“Those woods,” Sam nodded.  
  
“The ones… _outside?_ ”

“Yes, Josh. The ones outside.”  
  
With a loud, phlegmatic sound that was probably meant to be a laugh, Josh waved it off. “Aw, c’mon. They’re fine.”  
  
From where she’d been absently fiddling with the coffee machine, Ashley exhaled a silent breath of relief, every muscle in her body immediately relaxing.  
  
Sam’s brow furrowed. “No,” she said slowly, suddenly a teacher lecturing oblivious children, “No. It’s _dark_ out—”  
  
“So turn on some lights.”  
  
“I did,” she continued patiently. “But the storm—”  
  
Repeating his curt wave, Josh shook his head. “We… _grew up here_ , Sammy. They’re _fine_. No Washington has _ever_ gotten lost out there in those woods.”  
  
“They should’ve come back by now.” She paused, turning her gaze from Josh to Chris, instead. “They should be back.”  
  
He shrugged helplessly, hands opened wide. “Josh is right—they’ll be here. They’ll get cold. Or hungry. Or _something_. It’s not like the lodge is hard to find.”  
  
She went to say something else, to argue with them, to suggest they head outside and start _looking_ for them, but in a flash, Josh had his head in the sink again, vomiting loudly and violently. Slumping against the wall, she watched Ashley turn the tap on before placing a hand on his back, rubbing slow, comforting circles through his sweater. “Can you go talk to the others?” Sam asked Chris in a low voice as he removed himself from the scene, looking nauseous, himself. “If Hannah and Beth aren’t back in ten, we’re going out there.”  
  
“ _Me?_ ” He was quickly becoming sober, he realized, and the thought of having to go out into the other room and _deal_ with the others was…well, that was not a task for Sober Chris. Not that he currently _was_ Sober Chris. Really, he had turned a corner and was _approaching_ Sober Chris, but there was still a bit of work ahead of him before he quite got there. But even then _,_ _Drunk_ Chris would’ve had some hang-ups with the order, in all honesty. “Why not _you?_ They like you better,” he said, though he _meant_ something more along the lines of ‘ _They like_ everyone _better than_ me _._ ’  
  
But there would be no arguing with Samantha Giddings in that moment. Still looking just beyond him to Ashley and Josh, she shook her head. “Because I just might kill them, Chris,” she said airily enough, forcing a chilly smile. “I might literally kill them.”  
  
Rubbing some of the soreness from the back of his neck, Chris nodded. Sounded about right. He was still foggy on the details— _all_ of them, really—but he’d known Sam long enough to know that if _she_ was worried, shit was real. More than real. Like fifteen minutes _past_ real o’clock. “And what should I say…” he paused, tongue caught between two very, very different words. “…if they say no?”  
  
The other word, the one that had almost won, was ‘when.’ As in ‘What should I say _when_ they say no?’  
  
Sam seemed to understand, all the same. “Then you remind them that whatever happens out there is on them. See if _that_ changes their minds.” She turned to meet his eyes, raising and dropping her shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. “It was _their_ ‘prank.’ It was a shitty thing to do, and they should feel shitty about it.” Chris flashed her a jaunty little Boy Scout salute before starting for the great room, where the other four were still chattering in loud stage whispers. Before he could get too far, she gently grabbed the shoulder of his sweatshirt, tugging him back. “Hey, uh…” Her eyes traveled back to the other side of the kitchen, where Ashley was trying to get Josh to drink some water. “Should we be worried about how much he drank? He’s acting…weird.” Her voice was low again, almost conspiratorial.  
  
Chris glanced over his shoulder towards the sink as well, “What? Josh? Nah, he’s fine. Just overdid it, I guess.”  
  
“ _Chris_.” Sam looked back up at him, lips set in a firm line.  
  
His smile faltered for a second, replaced by an uncomfortable uncertainty. Even though he knew, somewhere deep down, time was of the essence, he couldn’t help but give her a brief, suspicious look. He was still too drunk to try and figure out how much she knew (or didn’t know) about the situation with Josh. Things went blurry again as he removed his glasses and pinched at the bridge of his nose, massaging the spot just under his eyebrow that seemed to throb with the promise of tomorrow’s migraine. “It’s…” he sighed, putting his glasses back on. “It’s probably a good thing he’s puking everything up.”  
  
Vague though it was, it was all the answer Sam needed. She released Chris’s arm, watching him disappear into the next room and around the corner before dropping her head into her hands. She couldn’t remember where she’d left her jacket. She couldn’t remember where the Washingtons kept their flashlights. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so afraid.

***

 **Ten minutes later**  
  
Two by two, they laced their boots and zipped their coats and checked the batteries of their flashlights and phones, setting out into the brewing storm.  
  
The cold seemed to snap Josh back to life, and it was he who gave each pair directions, sending them off into the woods like the silent commander of an old war movie. Mike and Emily, along with Matt and Jessica, were kept to the areas closest to the lodge. Outside of a visit or two apiece, their knowledge of the area was slim and none, and sending them deeper into the tree line would just be asking for more trouble. It was up to the remaining four to creep into the darker, thicker portion of the woods. None knew them so well as Josh, but they had all taken their fair share of walks and adventures over the years.

Of course, those walks had typically happened during the daylight hours and when the weather was nice. In the dark, in the snow, the woods seemed to take on a different ambiance entirely. In turn, each had a moment where they remembered with sudden alarm that _animals_ lived on the mountain. Some large, some with long teeth, some with claws, most hungry.

Even then, they pressed on, the wind carrying their calls of “ _Hannah!_ ” and “ _Beth!_ ” like the baleful howling of wolves. For the first fifteen minutes or so, they could hear the others’ shouts as well. Soon after, the trees seemed to absorb all sound. Chris and Ash navigated their way around a mostly frozen pond, Sam and Josh hoisted themselves over the trunk of a newly fallen tree. They walked and walked until their feet were numb and their legs shaking; they shouted until their voices croaked. And still there was no sign of the girls.  
  
Before much longer, their paths crossed again, Chris waving Josh and Sam over to him and Ashley. They agreed, mostly through hand gestures and pointed looks, that they would continue on. Rationally, the twins couldn’t have gotten much farther. There just…there wasn’t anywhere else _to go._ But by the time they reached the cliff, the storm was raging around them with a ferocity that was almost animalistic, lashing at their skin and freezing their eyes until their only option was to turn back to the lodge’s promise of warmth. Even with hands cupped to their lips, faces close, they could only just barely hear each other’s voices above the furious howling of the wind. Though none wanted to admit it, if the girls could hear them, if they could respond, the four of them would never know.  
  
At least…not until it was far, far too late.

 


	2. Where both twins are definitely (dead)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Relevant tags for this chapter: Angst, victim-blaming, allusions to medication, friends being angry at friends and getting super bummed out, the author has begun putting in Easter eggs that she thinks are clever (but probably aren't).

**Sunday, February 2, 2014  
** **8:00am**

The sun had been up for a couple of hours before anyone started moving again, but that wasn’t to say that there had been any rest. Between the four of them, there had been _maybe_ a combined hour of sleep, and even then, that was being generous.

It had been a trilling alarm from Sam’s phone (accidentally left on from the week prior) that had roused the others, prompting no grumbles, no yawns, but only quiet rustling as they gave up any further attempt at sleep. They had all taken their own posts near the three major entry points of the lodge: Sam nearest the door Hannah had run out of the night before, Ashley nearest the foyer and main entrance, Chris and Josh nearest the side entrance off the kitchen and dining area. The intention had been to have someone close in case the twins appeared in the small hours of the morning and needed to be let in.

But there they were, congregating at the foot of the stairs like the slow, battered zombies of a B-movie, left to accept the reality that neither Beth nor Hannah had returned.

Chris sat on one of the lowest stairs, his hand pressing hard against the left side of his face. His drunken prediction the night before had come to horrible fruition, it seemed; a 5-star migraine blurred his vision as though his glasses were smeared. The headache had long since taken on the gauzy throb of one of his more monstrous ones, but already he could feel it getting chummy with his hangover, promising to become something positively _debilitating_. As he watched Josh pace across the floor, he tried to remember where he’d left his meds—in his bag, obviously, but where was _that?_ Josh’s room? The coat closet? Had he brought it downstairs last night when they set up watch? Another stab of pain interrupted the thought and he shifted his hand to cover his left eye as best he could, still applying pressure to his head. If Josh kept moving back and forth like that, Chris thought, he might just puke.

Sitting one step above him, Sam anxiously rubbed at her arms, glancing around the empty room. “We should call the police,” she said finally, her voice a cracked croak from all the yelling she’d done last night. She swallowed hard before repeatedly trying to clear her throat to no avail. “If they’re still not here, we need to report it.”

“I don’t know about _you_ , but my phone’s still got _nothing_ ,” Josh snapped back, hardly pausing in his frantic pacing to pull his cellphone out and brandish it in their direction. “Storm’s knocked _everything_ out.”

She winced at the dry, whistling quality of his own hoarse voice. “What about the landline?”

“What _about_ the—” Immediately Josh froze, looking at Sam with an expression that suggested she’d just solved one of life’s greatest mysteries. Without another word, he marched into the dining room to frantically try the lodge’s phone.

Ashley, who had up until that moment been leaning against one of the staircase’s railings and staring at her own feet, glanced quickly to the others on the steps. “Oh _crap_ ,” she muttered, leaning down to Chris. “Migraine, huh?” When he only nodded in reply, she heaved a sigh through her nose. A person wouldn’t need to be a psychic to see that it was a _bad_ one, and she knew firsthand just how crippling his _bad_ ones could get. “Shoot. I can go—”

All three of them looked up as Josh stormed back into the room, furiously raking both hands through his hair. “Fucking landline’s down too! Of course it is. Of-fucking- _course_ it is! Why _wouldn’t_ it be?!”

Sam felt her stomach clench. “The storm probably knocked a line down…”

“Oh, do you think, Sammy? Do you think that could be what happened?”

Before she could reply, Chris spoke up, his voice a similar rasp. “C’mon, man, she’s just trying to help.”

Josh scoffed loudly and folded his arms across his chest. “Help,” he muttered disbelievingly. “ _Help_.”

“You know, snapping at everyone isn’t going to do anything.” It was uncharacteristically sharp, coming from Ashley, but the way she kept her eyes firmly on the ground was not.

“ _Oh._ Oh don’t _you_ start with _me_ , Ashley. Don’t you fucking d—”

Sam didn’t let them continue with their spat. She threw her hands out to her sides, shaking her head dismissively. “We need a _plan_ , okay? We need to figure out where we go from here, and _then_ we can all start yelling.” Her eyebrows moved up and together as she surveyed the room, “That work for everyone else? Good.” Letting her hands fall back onto her knees, she took a long, steadying breath. “If the phones don’t work here, we have to _find_ one that _does_. That’s gotta be priority number one, finding a way to call people and get them out here.”

“ _No_ ,” Josh started again, voice taut with impatience. “Priority number one is getting out there and _finding_ my sisters.”

Sam sighed, unable to help herself. “I want to find them just as badly as you do, but we need to—”

“Stop talking and get looking. Yeah, I agree,” he interrupted brusquely.

She looked over to Ashley and Chris, not sure whether she expected them to help or hurt her position. Neither met her eyes. Figured.

“We could…” Voice trailing off, Ashley offered the room a weak shrug. “I mean…now that it’s not dark out, we could have everyone split up and start looking again? If they have sunlight, I doubt that the others would—” **  
**

Josh shook his head fervently, taking up his pacing once more. “If we have _them_ go out and look, then we’ll have to find _six_ people out in the woods instead of just _two!_ They don’t know where the fuck they’re going—they’ll be lost the _second_ they step off the path!”

“Then we _don’t_ send them to look.” Wincing, Chris looked back up, hand still pressed over his left eye to block out as much light as possible. “They know how to get back to the cable car, don’t they? So…why don’t we just have them go down to the ranger station at the base of the mountain?” He shifted just enough to glance in Ashley’s direction, as though for approval. “They’ve _gotta_ have a working phone. Maybe like a…satellite phone or something? Those are things, right? They go down and explain, get the rangers to come up here too. _They’ll_ know where to look.”

Entirely unaware she’d done it, Sam had pressed her hand against her chest, trying to steady the anxious pounding of her heart. “And while _they’re_ heading down the mountain, _we_ can keep looking.” She exhaled deeply, already drafting a to-do list in her head. “ _We_ won’t get lost—especially if we stick together.”

“Only all of you seem to be forgetting one itsy, bitsy detail: We looked _everywhere_ last night!” Josh snapped suddenly, voice tense and harried in a way that neither Chris nor Ashley had ever heard and that Sam didn’t much care for. He seemed utterly unaware that it had been _his_ suggestion to start looking again, only moments ago. “We went the way they ran off, we didn’t see _shit_ , and now that it’s been snowing all fucking night, there won’t be _any_ signs of them for us to follow, so what do you propose we _do?_ Where do we look that we haven’t already _covered?_ ”

There was a beat of silence between the four of them, Josh watching as each of the other three, in turn, avoided meeting his eyes. It was only after an eternity of discomfort that Ashley looked up from her socks, eyes wide in revelation like one of the heroines from her mystery novels. When she spoke, breaking the palpable tension between them, there was something like victory in her voice. “We _didn’t_ look everywhere.”

Josh was on her like a hawk immediately, eyes narrowed. “ _Ashley_ —”

She shook her head, looking over to him for the first time since they’d attempted sleep. “The guest cabin! We didn’t go to the cabin last night, and…think about it! They could get out of the cold, there’s a fireplace, blankets…” Though she wouldn’t let it show, she thought she could feel the slightest hint of a smile tugging at her lips; it was a welcome relief from the tight, worried grimace she’d been wearing for the past few hours.

Sam looked over to her at the revelation, the nervous pit in her chest filling with a low thrum of hope. “Isn’t…isn’t the cabin usually locked, though?” she asked, glancing quickly to Josh.

He stared back at Ashley with an expression that was almost impossible to read, the gears in his mind whirring at a hundred miles an hour. “It is…” Josh started slowly, words quickly gaining speed as he processed the thought. “But even if neither of them had their keys on them, there’s—”

As if on cue, Chris lifted his head from where it’d been hanging, glasses askew. “The spare hidden out back!” He, Josh, and Ashley took a second to exchange a series of looks that wouldn’t have been out of place in an old _Scooby Doo_ cartoon before appearing to sigh in relief all at once, their bodies going noticeably lax. “That’s gotta be it,” Chris said, reaching up and proudly nudging Ashley in the side. “Good thinkin’, kiddo.”

Even as she rolled her eyes in his direction, Ashley let the first sign of her smile show, only just turning up the corners of her mouth. “Well it’s a starting point, at least,” she muttered, attributing most of the heat in her face to the sudden lifting of guilt from her gut. “It’s still snowing pretty hard, so they probably just…crashed for the night where it was safe and warm.”

“All right, all right…” Sam pressed her fingers to her temples, staring off into middle space as she plotted it all out in her head. Her lips moved silently as she thought to herself, running through a checklist none of them could see. “We should pack bags.”

“Huh?”

Eyes focusing on the others once more, Sam nodded once, matter-of-factly. “If we find— _when_ we find them—they’re going to be cold and hungry, you know? So we should stuff a few bags before we head out. Clothes and food and water.”

Josh shook an appreciative finger in her direction. “Sammy, _that’s_ the kinda thinking we need right now! Let’s get on that like five minutes ago, huh people? Come _on!_ ”

Sam was already on her feet, heading up the stairs. “I know where their clothes are, I’ll pack the bags,” she said, already halfway up.

That meant there was only one other chore to do. Ashley winced as she realized that, between Chris’s head and Josh’s worry, the responsibility of getting the others fell to her. “Aaand I’ll go get everyone else,” she added, voice much less self-assured than Sam’s had been. She skirted around Chris, patting his shoulder once as she passed by.

A strange tension filled the space between Josh and Chris once the girls left, unspoken but drifting through the air like so many dust motes. Chris wanted to write it off as being part of the gnawing discomfort in his head, but found it very difficult to do. Through his hangover, through his headache, he was left with the sinking feeling that he had done something very, very _wrong_ , and that a significant share of Josh’s anger was aimed _directly_ at him. He couldn’t figure out _what_ he’d done, though, and so he did his best to pretend it was all in his head. “We’re gonna find them, man,” he said when he found it impossible to deal with the silence. “You, like… _know that_ , right?”

Josh only hummed in response, already in the process of tugging his boots back on.

The sinking feeling in Chris’s gut only intensified with that, making the minutes between them stretch on like hours. He racked his brain as best he could, but no matter how he ran through the last night’s events, he couldn’t think of a _single_ thing he could’ve done to wrong Josh. The aching behind his eye didn’t help. He settled for occasionally looking back over to him, squinting against the light, hoping against hope that maybe he would just come out and _say it_. Josh always _did_ say it, eventually—more than ten years’ experience had taught him that much—but only after it had festered into something awful. _God_ , Chris hoped this wouldn’t be one of those times.

From above, there was the faint sound of socks thudding on the stairs. A moment later, Ashley appeared on the middle landing, lips pursed into an anxious shape. “They should be down in a second,” she said to neither of them in particular, easing herself down to sit next to Chris on the step. She pulled a bright pill bottle from the pocket of her hoodie and handed it to him, her concern still evident. “Here, I’ll grab you some water, too. And I can like…I can make breakfast for everyone while we wait.”

Chris grasped the bottle as if it were the Holy Grail. “Ah man, Ash, thanks—”

“ _Breakfast?_ ” The laughter in Josh’s voice was cold with disbelief. “Yeah, let’s just serve ‘em up a continental-style _feast_. Reward everyone for carrying out an exemplary job of being absolute _fuckasses_.”

She didn’t look up to him, instead continuing to watch Chris fumble with the childproof lid of the bottle for a moment before attempting to snatch it back up and do it for him. She pulled a face as he angled himself away from her to thwart the effort, leaving her with no option but to face Josh again. “We can’t send them out to walk all the way to the ranger station without _eating_. It’s freezing cold, and that’s a really long walk. Plus, you _know_ none of them slept, and _everyone_ drank too much last night, so…”

He folded his arms across his chest in a manner that somehow managed to be unspeakably confrontational, considering he made no move to step closer to her. “Cuz my sisters are getting to eat this morning, right? Before being out in the cold, I mean. And wandering around. Running around in the snow. I bet they slept _real_ good, too.”

“Hey, guys…come on.” It was the most Chris could manage between jolts of pain. The lid finally gave with a faint _pop_ beneath his palm, and he breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “ _Everyone’s_ right, okay? We gotta get out there ASAP, definitely, but if we’re all hungover and sick, it’s just…nothing’s gonna get done.” He shot a glance Josh’s way, _positive_ he looked the very picture of pathetic and _praying_ it did something to curb his ire. “Food, then we all hit the trail. We’ll only waste more time if we’re queasy and stumbling.”

Sam walked back down the stairs just in time to watch Josh drop his arms to his sides in frustration, stalking off towards the kitchen. “…what?” she asked, directing the question to the others as she unslung the two bags hanging from her shoulders, setting them down against the bottom step.

Neither answered—not _really_. Chris shrugged dourly as Ashley got back to her feet, apprehensively following after Josh to the kitchen.

“Oh,” she said, watching as the three of them left her alone in the great room. “Helpful. Thanks, guys.”

***

**9:27am**

Breakfast had been awkward, to say the _very_ least.

Chris had been the only one able to wriggle his way out of it, explaining with a wince that “You _know_ I can’t eat when my head’s like this,” before disappearing to the second floor’s bathroom to stand under the hot shower spray with all the lights turned off.

There had been no escape for anyone else. The first few minutes had passed tensely, most of them picking nonchalantly at the mountain of eggs Ashley had scrambled (Sam, of course, opting to eat the emergency granola bar from the bottom of her own backpack instead). No one had said anything, and no one had pretended that things were okay. Even the quickest glance around the room served as proof positive that things were, in fact, as far from okay as they had ever been.

It was hardly a surprise that the first person to speak had been Josh; what _had_ been a surprise was his curt demand that Matt give him his phone. There had been no arguing. Matt had simply handed him the phone with a nervous, stilted promise that he hadn’t had service all night, and that the video hadn’t been sent to _anyone_. Not that he _would’ve_ sent the video to anyone. Not after the girls ran off. Not after they didn’t come back.

Everyone had made it a point to drop their eyes when Josh hit play on the video, and no one was shocked when he disappeared into the great room to watch it away from the rest of them, moments later. Everyone had pretended not to notice the look on his face when he returned after what seemed like forever, handing Matt’s phone back to him, the video deleted from his camera roll. Neither Mike nor Emily nor Jessica fought him then, each going along with it silently when he demanded phone after phone to check that the video truly _hadn’t_ been spread.

By the time Chris reemerged from the shower, it had been ascertained that no, none of them had any proof of the night’s prank on their phones.

Pulling up the stool Josh had been sitting in the night before, Chris sat himself down at the island. He watched with bleary eyes as Matt and Mike huddled over a faded park map laid out on the wine counter, Josh tracing out their route with hand motions that were just a little too curt for comfort. He took careful inventory of the others: Sam, sitting on a countertop and nibbling halfheartedly at the sort of granola bar that crumbled into rock-hard shards the second you bit into it; Jessica and Emily at the far end of the island, using their glasses of juice to hide their mouths (and therefore, conversation) from everyone else; and Ashley, stacking dirty dishes in the sink like a _Tetris_ champ. It was quite a difference in atmosphere from the last time they’d all been milling about the kitchen.

As though sensing his eyes, Ashley turned from the sink, pausing only long enough to stand on tiptoe and grab a mug from one of the overhead cupboards. She filled it with coffee from the pot and crossed the expanse of the kitchen. “Think you can eat something yet?” she asked, setting the mug down in front of Chris as she leaned against the island.

His eyes flit to the tray of now room-temperature eggs. There was a warning cramp in his lower stomach, causing him to grimace even as he took the mug appreciatively. “Uh…maybe toast?”

“Got it.”

“You don’t have t—”

She waved it off before he could finish, already setting off on her new task.

Over at the wine rack, Josh kept his elbows on the counter, his body bent nearly 90°. “Think you can manage that?” he asked, still tracing map with his eyes.

“Yeah.” Matt’s tone had been uncharacteristically cowed since Josh had first demanded his phone, and there was no sign of that changing anytime soon. “It’s a pretty straight shot.”

“We got it.” Mike’s voice was significantly more confident as he slid the map off the counter and folded it back up, tucking it away in the back pocket of his jeans. “We’ll be down there in no time flat, grab the rangers, and then…” he exchanged a quick, wordless look with Matt while Josh’s eyes were still downcast. “…then we’ll be right back up.” He didn’t sound particularly pleased with the thought.

“It’s literally the exact same path you took to get up here from the bus, and then maybe half a mile down the road.” It was as if Josh hadn’t heard a word they’d said (and truthfully, he _hadn’t_ ), straightening back up once Mike removed the map from in front of him. “Ranger station’s huge. Impossible to miss. As long as you stick to the marked path, and then the road, there’s _no_ way for you to get lost.”

Mike and Matt glanced towards each other again, the former raising an eyebrow, the latter shrugging. “We won’t get off the path,” Mike assured him. “Def, def, def won’t get off the path.” He turned around fully, trying to lock eyes with one of the girls. “Hey, Em! Can you ladies grab the thermoses? We should get a move on.”

From across the kitchen, Emily and Jessica favored him with looks strangely identical in their petulance. No one needed to ask to know that the two of them weren’t too keen on leaving the warmth of the lodge. It was only once Mike subtly nodded in Josh’s direction that Emily sucked a breath through her teeth and got up from her stool, pouring the rest of the coffeepot’s contents into two large thermoses.

Josh rummaged in his pocket before pulling out a handful of keys, lips drawn tight as he flipped through each of them. “Here’s the key to the cable car,” he said finally, handing it over to Mike, “Don’t lose it.”

There was a moment where it looked as if Mike was on the verge of losing his patience, but it passed. He simply took the key with a sagely nod, pocketing it as he had the map. “We’ll be back ASAP. Good luck out there.”

Raising his mug in a slight salute, Chris muttered a tired, “You too,” before going back to picking at his dry piece of toast.

The sound of boots clomping through the great room grew quieter and quieter, punctuated by the front entrance clicking shut. Without the other four, the lodge suddenly felt much bigger, much emptier; the air seemed to thicken around them, becoming stale with the smell of cooked eggs and coffee grounds.

It was too much for Sam to handle. She slid off the counter, unclipping her hair from her head anxiously. She caught a whiff of herself then, realizing how badly she reeked of last night’s bonfire. “I’ll be ready to go in a sec,” she said to the room, resisting the urge to stick her tongue out at the smell. “I really gotta get out of these clothes…” Sam was halfway up the stairs before it occurred to her that neither Chris _nor_ Josh had made any sort of smartass wisecrack at the comment. For some reason, that filled her with another icy wave of dread.

Ashley waited until Chris had finished his measly piece of toast before collecting the rest of the dishes scattered on the island, stacking them up neatly and depositing them into the sink. There was nothing she wanted more than to fill the other side of the basin with hot, soapy water, roll up her sleeves, and just get to work. When things felt insurmountable, when her anxiety was at its worst, she needed to _do_ things. The mountain of plates, the piles of silverware…they were just calling her name. She would’ve given her right arm to just stay in the lodge and clean, instead of being faced with the looming challenge of trekking back out into the snow.

“Ashley.”

She bristled slightly, feeling the fine hairs at the nape of her neck tingle unpleasantly. It was a small, childish sort of sensation— _most_ people called her Ashley all the time, after all, but not Chris and not Josh. She was just Ash to _them_. Deflated, she realized Josh had been using her full name all day, not unlike a displeased parent. It rankled her in a way she couldn’t fully articulate. “Mhm?” she hummed, trying to keep the worry out of her tone as she absently rearranged the dirty dishes.

“Give me your phone.”

Well that was…that was unexpected. Blinking in surprise, she turned from the sink to find Josh standing behind her, hand open and waiting. “Uh…what?”

“Give. Me,” he said again, parsing each word with painstaking deliberateness, “Your. Phone.”

She blinked again, clearly not comprehending. Almost too quickly to be seen, her eyes flicked to Chris, finding no explanation and certainly no help. Ashley looked back to Josh with her brow wrinkled and hands at her sides. “Why?” she finally asked, her stomach giving the same fearful jolt it had the night before.

Josh sucked in a breath through a grit jaw, still impatiently holding his hand out to her. “Oh nonono, we’re past that. The whole deer-in-headlights thing isn’t gonna cut the mustard here. You _saw_ me look at everyone else’s, you _heard_ why I was doing it, so cut the shit. Give me your fucking phone.”

Her throat felt impossibly tight as the implication of his demand set in. “You…you think _I_ would’ve recorded that?” And oh, she hated how _small_ , how _weak_ , how _hurt_ her voice sounded, but she was finding it hard enough to pull in air as she looked up into Josh’s accusatory stare. “How could you think _I_ —”

He didn’t give her time enough to finish. “How _could_ I? Oh, that is…that is just _rich_ , Ashley. How could I think _you_ might have done something as shitty as that? Well, honestly, if you had asked me—mmm, let’s say six hours ago—whether I thought _you_ , of _all people_ , were _capable_ of doing something that shitty, I gotta say my answer would probably be a resounding ‘no’. However! In light of recent events, my answer’s a little different. Now it’s a little less ‘no,’ and a little more ‘give me your fucking phone before I _take_ it from you.’”

None of them saw Sam walk in from the adjoining room, but that was just fine by her. Her eyes widened slightly as she read the tone of the room, shrinking herself against one of the walls to hang back in the periphery of the argument.

From where he sat at the island, head in his hands, Chris muttered a low, “Josh…”

“Shut up,” he snapped, turning his head towards him only slightly, keeping his eyes solidly on Ashley’s.

In a scene eerily reminiscent of the night before, Chris groaned before setting his head down onto the table, using his arms to block out the ambient morning light shining through the kitchen window.

Sam looked on, feeling oddly caught between three warring factions. (Or maybe it was really just two—but God, it was so hard to tell.) She said nothing, making a point of avoiding looking at any of them for too long, sliding her hands into her pockets idly as she leaned against the wall and its ugly red painting.

The windowpanes rattled in the frame as the storm continued to scream around them. It seemed to spur Ashley into action one way or another, as she reached into her pocket, pulled out her phone, and slammed it down into Josh’s palm in one decisive motion. She held his eyes for another second before brusquely stalking around him, heading out of the kitchen and towards the staircase.

Josh _did_ turn then, watching her with an expression that was difficult to read. “Uh, and where are we off to?”

Chris had managed to sit up halfway once more, still resting the majority of his weight against one arm. He reached out, managing to catch one of Ashley’s too-long sleeves before she could pass by. “Ash…” he started, only to be cut off when she pulled away, pace never slowing.

“Hey!”

“I’m changing my clothes,” she answered tersely, already disappearing around the corner. “Not gonna sit here and watch you go through my stuff.” And then she was gone, taking the stairs just quickly enough to make it clear that she had no intention of hanging around to hear whatever else might be flung her way. A few moments later, there was the distant sound of a door slamming from above.

Chris grimaced as though it had slammed in his face.

The clock on the wall ticked out another handful of seconds before Sam puffed out her cheeks in an uncomfortable huff, pushing herself away from the wall. “I’m just…going to go bundle up,” she mumbled, knowing full well neither of them was listening to her. “I guess,” she added under her breath.

Once the room fell silent around them again, save for the ticking of the clock, Chris let out a quiet groan and let his head fall back onto the tabletop. “Josh, bro, I know you’re upset—”

If Josh heard him, he gave no sign. He leaned himself back against the island as he opened Ashley’s phone and navigated to her camera roll, pointedly scrolling through the entire length of it. There hadn’t been any video from the night before—at least it seemed _Matt_ was telling the truth about not being able to send it out—but he was already too deep in his own head to call it quits. He’d been in Ashley’s phone countless times before, so he’d known what to expect, but as he flicked through her photos, he found himself seized with a mightily powerful urge to delete every last one he was in. He stared for a moment longer before reining _that_ particular feeling back in, setting the phone down on the table a bit harder than was entirely necessary. Without thinking about it, he pulled out the stool Chris had passed out in the night before, letting his legs drop out from under him as he sat.

“Josh—”

“Don’t.” He turned Ashley’s phone over so that its screen lay hidden against the tabletop.

“We’re gonna _find_ them, man, and it’s gonna be fine, we just—”

“I said _don’t_.”

He fell silent for a moment, removing his glasses before dropping his head into his hands. His head hurt too badly, his eyes were throbbing, his jaw was tight, and the slice of toast in his gut was settling like liquid cement. It would’ve been easier to stay quiet, to let Josh fume, but he seemed helpless to keep his mouth closed. “Did you really have to take _Ash’s_ phone, though?”

Scoffing, Josh shook his head. If Chris had been looking up, he would’ve seen the incredulous sneer twisting its way around his features. “If we’re getting rangers and cops involved, it’s only a matter of time before this shit’s on the internet. Pardon me if I don’t want to run the risk of those fucks humiliating Hannah to go viral while we’re working on fucking _finding_ her and Beth.”

“No I _get_ it. I really _do_. I would’ve done that too, but… _Ash_ , Josh? Come on.”

“She was _part_ of it.”

“Not…not _really_ , not like the others—”

He resisted the urge to pick up the phone and slam it back down on the table. “Don’t you _dare_ side with her, Cochise. Don’t even fucking _think_ about it. Not fucking today, man. Not after what she went and did.”

“I’m not _siding_ with anyone! I’m just saying—”

“Well _I’m_ saying that I don’t want to hear it.” Josh looked across the table, staring patiently until Chris looked up, meeting his eyes pointedly. “And I mean it. Do not _try_ me on this.”

“Okay,” Chris said, holding his hands palms-out in surrender. “ _Okay_.”

***

**12:19pm**

They were not in the guest cabin, as it turned out.

The path from the lodge to the cabin was a veritable obstacle course of snowy slopes dipping down before rising up, spiraling around copses of trees. Last night’s storm had dumped a ridiculous amount of snow onto the trail; the heavy, wet sort of snow that clung to boots and pants, making movement ten times more difficult than it needed to be. And when one considered the way the wind was still whipping great gobs of snow and ice into their faces, it was almost impressive that they had made it all the way to the cabin’s porch before they’d needed to rest.

The porch was piled high with snow, the spare key lay untouched in the fake rock the Washingtons kept out back, and the only sign of Beth or Hannah were the family photos decorating the interior.

None of them spoke as they caught their breath.

Sam took the initiative to light a small fire in the grate, only feeding it a single log since it seemed likely they’d be on their way out again before too long. She plopped herself down on the hardwood floor, legs stretched out in front of her so that her pants wouldn’t get wet from the dripping of her thawing boots. Her eyes felt heavy, as though they were made of rock instead of tissue, but try as she might, she couldn’t figure out if it was due to the cold they’d just trudged their way through, or the desire to sob rearing its ugly head. She feared it was the second option. The _last thing_ any of them needed was for any _one_ of them to lose it. Already in her head, she could see the implications—the moment _one_ of them broke down, the other three would collapse like a house of cards in a windstorm. It was inevitable. She couldn’t imagine that Chris, Ashley, or Josh were particularly gifted in terms of emotional fortitude. So she stared into her puny fire and kept her mouth shut.

On his third sweep of the cabin, Josh all but tore the shower curtain from the rod, pushing it aside like the hero of one of his shitty horror movies. But there was no deranged psycho in the tub, nor was there any hint of his sisters, and so he let out a furious grunt before turning back around, throwing open the doors to the bedroom closet again.

Chris and Ashley watched him like silent gargoyles from the bed. After their hike up to the cabin, he’d been able to make it through one _extremely_ thorough look around the cabin before needing to lie down, but now it was hard for Chris to so much as lift his head up from the pile of decorative throw pillows. There wasn’t any way in the great blue fuck he was about to try telling Josh to calm down or give it a rest…or much of anything else, for that matter. The exertion of the trip had left him completely at the mercy of his headache. Likewise, Ashley hadn’t said a single _word_ since she’d come back down from changing her clothes earlier, the rims of her eyes raw and red. She just watched Josh storm around the rooms, entirely unmoving but for her gaze tracking his erratic arcs.

“This is pointless.” The closet door slammed shut with enough force to knock a few icicles from the cabin’s gutters, not that any of them were able to see. Josh pressed his forehead against the door for a second or two, brow furrowed as he thought. “This is pointless,” he repeated. And then, “This is _pointless!_ ” There was another resounding _bang!_ when he slammed his forehead against the door, startling the other three so badly that Chris sat up, Ashley sprang to her feet, and Sam appeared in the doorway.

Her eyes were wide with confusion, only growing wider when she noticed the angry mark blooming on Josh’s head. “Whuh?” Considering the kind of day she was having, Sam figured that was probably as good as she was going to do.

“They’re not fucking _here_ , we’re wasting _time_ , let’s fucking _go_.” The snap was back in Josh’s voice, doing an excellent job of covering up the waver it had been threatening to take on. He didn’t bother to look over his shoulder as he skulked his way towards the front door. “ _Now_.”

Sam turned her attention back to Ashley and Chris, clearly still perplexed. She held her hands out at her sides, palms up, gesturing vaguely in hopes of _any_ kind of explanation; Ashley just mirrored the motion, shrugging her shoulders tiredly. Wetting her lower lip, Sam looked between them. She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper as she asked, “Where else are we supposed to _go?_ ”

Ashley shrugged again, zipping her jacket back up. “I don’t know…the path ends behind the cabin, so…”

There was no staunching the zombie-like groan that escaped him as he stood up from the bed, wincing at the movement. “There’s the sanitarium. Sanatorium. Whatever. There’s that.” Chris rubbed his forehead as though _he’d_ been the one to headbutt the door in frustration. “That’s…probably where we’re headed next.”

Before Sam could reply, Ashley goggled at him. “There’s no _way_ we can get _there!_ We’d have to cross the valley, and—”

“Oh, I’m sorry, am I interrupting tea time?” Josh was in the doorway again, eyes narrowed incredulously. “Let’s. Fucking. _Go_.”

That time, Sam followed after him immediately. “Okay,” she said, keeping her tone as even as she was capable of. “Where were you thinking we should go from here?” She made a point to fuss with the straps of the bag she’d slung over her back, trying to appear non-confrontational.

“There’s a fire watch station east of the lodge.” Josh pulled his hat down over his ears, glaring in the general direction they’d be going. “Not a _chance_ they would’ve climbed that sonuvabitch, but it’s high enough that we can at least get a view of everything else. If…” he paused. _‘If they’re not up there’_ was what he had been _about_ to say, what he had _almost_ said, but found he couldn’t get those words out. He didn’t want to put that possibility out into the universe. He wanted to keep it safe, locked up in his own head where no one else could hear it, think it, or even _consider_ it. “If the others are back with the rangers, that’s probably where some of ‘em are headed anyway.”

She nodded silently before turning her gaze to follow his. “I think that’s a really good idea.” Sam swallowed hard, trying to restrain the shiver beginning to creep up her spine. The _‘if’_ had occurred to her, too.

Once Josh and Sam had stepped out, Ashley grabbed Chris by the sleeve, signaling with a gentle tug that he should hang back. She peered around the doorway briefly before tucking the two of them just out of the others’ view, not quite in the kitchenette, but not quite in the bedroom. “You should really go back to the lodge and lie down.” A deep crease had appeared between her eyebrows, speaking volumes of her worry. “We can keep looking, the three of us—”

“Ash, I’m not going back to the lodge.”

Her concern melted into frustration, the flushing of her freezing face making it seem as though she was going red with rage. “You look like you’re going to pass out. Don’t stand there and act like you can fake your way out of this—I’ve _seen_ your migraines, and you should be in _bed_. If he wants us to go all the way to the sanatorium…”

As though in response, the spot just under his eyebrow gave an agonizing throb. Chris groaned and gave in, reaching up to press his fingers up against the angry nerve, trying to find some modicum of relief. “I know.”

“Getting _here_ was hard enough!” she hissed. “Getting back to the lodge will suck serious dong. Going _all the way across the mountain?_ Chris. You _can’t_.”

“Did you just say ‘suck some serious _dong?’_ ” Aw shit, it literally hurt to smile. Chris did his best to refrain, sounding perfectly dejected as he sighed, instead. “I’m not saying bailing isn’t an appealing offer…but I can’t just…” he exhaled and lowered his voice further. “I can’t just leave Josh like this right now, okay?”

From outside, Josh’s voice rang out, “Are you guys coming or _what?_ ”

Ashley glanced in the direction he’d spoken from as though she could see through the wall of the guest cabin. She reached up and pressed her hand to her temple almost like if it was _she_ who was contending with a headache, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling. “You aren’t going to be much help if you’re _dying_ ,” she said bitterly.

He blew out another heavy breath, leaning backwards so the others could see him in the doorway, offering a brief wave to acknowledge they were coming. “I appreciate the thought Ash, really, I do, but uh…I’m not the one we need to worry about…well…” A pause, “ _Dying_.”

Her eyes snapped back to him, the corners of her mouth tightening with something akin to shame. Ashley gave the interior of the guest cabin one last look before nodding, gesturing for Chris to leave before her.

Before he could think too heavily on it, Chris reached out and gave her a reassuring pat between her shoulders, his hand lingering for maybe a little _too_ long as they exchanged rigid, worried smiles.

“Anything you wanna share with the class?” Josh asked as they emerged, stepping around the two of them to lock the cabin door. His displeasure was evident; he spoke with the tone of a teacher plucking a note from a student’s hand.

Hunching her shoulders, Ashley shook her head and walked past him, carefully making her way down the porch’s stairs to where Sam was waiting.

***

**2:45pm  
**

Apparently, despite the vehemence of Josh’s plan, they just weren’t meant to get to the watchtower. They’d had to double back, retracing their steps to get back to the lodge, first. It was a lot like the old song—only instead of going over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house, it was more like they went over the river, through the woods, over the river again, past the overlook, through the woods again, over the river again, and through the woods _again_. There had only been one time where they’d stopped to rest for all of two minutes, and that was because Sam had noticed something they’d missed on the way there.

“Could they have gone in _there?_ ” she’d asked, staring uncertainly at the wooden planks crisscrossing what appeared to be a hole in the mountain itself.

Josh hadn’t even followed her eyes before he’d shaken his head. “That’s the mine. _No one_ goes in the mine. Shit’s a deathtrap. The girls wouldn’t even _think_ about it.”

And they’d been back on their way. After all, the entrance _was_ boarded up, and it would’ve taken a hell of a contortionist to squeeze between the planks.

By the time they neared the lodge, even _Sam’s_ legs were shaking with exertion. Honestly, she wasn’t entirely sure how the other three, _significantly_ less physically capable than she was, were managing to still stand upright. She slowed her pace only slightly to check on them, but found her eyes momentarily caught by a path rubbed raw on a nearby tree. It was a welcome excuse to stop for another second, and she cocked her head to the side as she checked it out. When she realized what it was, she couldn’t help but blow an exhausted raspberry in lieu of a laugh. “Welp. Doesn’t that just figure.”

“Huh?” In a flash, Josh was beside her, expecting some sort of clue as to the girls’ whereabouts. When he saw that it was just a carving in the bark, a childishly angular heart with ‘E & M’ etched into it, he rolled his eyes and kept walking.

“Hmm,” Ashley hummed, peeking over Sam’s shoulder as she passed by, never breaking her stride.

“For _real?_ ” Chris added, rolling his eyes in much the same way Josh had. “That kind of thing is so stupid—nothing says _‘I love you’_ quite like stabbing a tree repeatedly.” He scoffed loudly, his breath pluming out in frantic puffs in front of him, constantly fogging his glasses. “Is there _anyone on Earth_ who still thinks that’s some big, romantic gesture?”

Beside him, Ashley shrugged slightly, tugging her scarf up to cover a little more of her face. “I mean…it’s _kind of_ sweet, isn’t it?”

“Oh, well, uh…” Looking helplessly to Sam, and then to the back of Josh’s head, Chris found no aid, no pity. It was what he got, letting his mouth run like it did. “I mean, yeah, it can be. I guess. Just.” He grimaced to himself, glaring up at the sky as the gears of his brain whirred. “Just not when it’s Mike and Emily, y’know? I find it hard to think of anything Mike does as ‘romantic,’” he added, hooking his fingers in scathing air-quotes for emphasis.

Josh rolled his eyes again, this time so intensely that he very nearly stepped off the path. “Nice save, Cochise,” he said under his breath, not without a fair amount of disdain. His eyes narrowed as the relative silence of the woods was broken by muted, far-off voices. Pushing ahead, he was left to contend with the leaden weight of fear settling down on his shoulders, making each of his footsteps feel as though the snow had turned to quicksand. They exited the copse of trees back to the clearing of the lodge, greeted by a row of three ranger vehicles parked just past the picnic table. In that moment, the world around him snapped into horrible clarity, everything feeling much too _real_ : Josh was immediately aware of each snowflake landing on his face, the heavy thumping of blood in his neck and wrists, the weight of his tongue against his teeth.

Without really noticing it, all four of them had stopped at the sight, standing in something of a haphazard line in the snow. They gawked as if they had never seen cars before, as if they feared crossing the threshold from the woods into the clearing and into the line of darkened headlights would send them tumbling to their death.

It felt like they stood out there for another hour or two, though in reality it was much closer to a minute before Josh took the lead again, making his way up the steep stairs to the side entrance of the great room. The other three hustled after him, silent specters caked with snow.

Coming back in from the cold was more than just a little jarring; the heat of the lodge felt almost oppressive by comparison, not so much _thawing_ them as _melting_. Chris’s glasses fogged up instantly, Ashley’s face grew painfully red, Sam’s entire body broke out in a hot sweat underneath her jacket, and Josh found himself uncomfortably close to vomiting again.

The desire to puke only grew stronger when the first ranger approached them, her face serious and her pace brisk. “Oh!” she said as she spotted them, “Is one of you Josh Washington?” Her accent was more Quebec than Calgary, Josh noticed as he flicked two fingers upwards in a halfhearted salute to indicate that he was, indeed, himself. Lips curling into a tight, pitying smile, the ranger stuck out her hand and introduced herself

Josh didn’t hear her. Not really. The world had taken on a peculiar sort of hum, making it difficult to hear or understand much of anything over the rhythmic whooshing of his own blood in his ears. It didn’t matter. She had a nametag he could read, after all (Josie Défago). Distantly, he realized she was ushering him towards the relative privacy of the dining room. His feet followed, but it felt as though he left his stomach on the floor of the great room, entrails dragging after him. He wasn’t much of a lip reader, but he thought he could recognize a few of the words she was saying well enough: _Beth,_ and _Hannah_ , and _sisters_ , and _parents_. Behind him, the dining room’s door swung shut.

***

**4:23pm  
**

By the time Ashley had made her way through the majority of the weekend’s dishes, the worried voice in the back of her head—usually a quiet, petty little thing—had revved itself up to a panicked scream. Through the kitchen window, she could see the beginnings of the sunset, and knew implicitly that once the sun went down and the sky went dark, none of them would be able to convince themselves that the girls had just ‘gotten turned around.’ Soon, and far too soon for her comfort, they would have to admit that twins were _lost_.

She scrubbed harder at a spot of melted-on cheese.

It didn’t help that Josh was doing the _thing_ he did when he was mad. The ‘refuse-to-respond-to-anyone-except-to-glare’ thing. The ‘using-full-names-despite-being-a-nicknamer’ thing. The _Josh_ thing.

And it was her fault—of _course_ it was her fault. She’d been the one stupid enough and desperate enough for attention to go along with the prank, she’d been the one who hid in the guest room and giggled along with the others. She was the one who’d made the mistake of dancing across those invisible social lines, leaving the safety and well-outlined expectations of their triad to try and be a part of the others’ game. She should’ve known better. Fuck, she _had_ known better! But no. She’d had to go and—

Not that it was _entirely_ her fault—because of _course_ it wasn’t _entirely_ her fault. _She_ hadn’t been the one who’d run out into the snow, and _she_ hadn’t been the one who overreacted so badly. Hell, people were _always_ playing pranks like that on her! Josh had only the night before, with all the blood in the basement, and had _she_ responded by throwing herself out into the wilderness? _No!_ No she _hadn’t_ , because she was a _rational human being_ who knew how to take a joke. There had been no _need_ for Hannah to freak out the way she did. There were a million things Hannah could’ve done _other_ than run out into a snowstorm in the middle of the night, and no one _made_ Beth run after her, so really, the fact of the matter was—

There was a clink from behind her, and she spun around with a gasp only to find Sam setting an empty glass down on the island.

“Ohmygod,” she exhaled, shaking the water from one of her hands before pressing it against her own heart, trying to will it to slow back down. “I didn’t hear you walk in."

“Yeah,” Sam said, her tone uncharacteristically glum. “Sorry about that.” She had spent the better part of the evening sitting at the foot of Hannah’s bed, her head in her hands, staring at the floor through her knees. Every hour that ticked by without any news of the twins felt a little more surreal. It had just been…well, _‘easier’_ wasn’t the right word, because there was nothing _easy_ about sitting in that silent room, surrounded by butterflies and the smell of Hannah’s perfume; it hadn’t been _easier_ , per se, but it had simply felt like the thing to _do_ , sit around in Hannah’s room and pretend she was hiding downstairs somewhere.

It hadn’t really worked, though. Sam still felt seven different kinds of miserable.

“Thinking?” she asked Ashley, folding her arms across her chest before leaning back against the wine rack.

She furrowed and unfurrowed her brow, looking back down to her pruny fingers. “Yeah.” Ashley was suddenly acutely aware of how _exhausted_ she was. Using her forearm instead of her hand, she rubbed at the bridge of her nose, sighing weakly. “Yeah. Lots of thinking.”

Sam nodded. Her head fell gently back against one of the cupboards as she angled her eyes up towards the ceiling. “I hear that.” She blinked hard, disappointed but not surprised when her eyes continued to ache. It was difficult _not_ to think of the scene she’d walked in on earlier that morning, Ashley in front of the sink, Josh standing where Sam was now. Suspecting that maybe it wasn’t the wisest thing to do, Sam couldn’t help herself but to ask, “Anything you wanna talk about?”

Shrugging, Ashley piled another few handfuls of silverware into the drying rack. “Just…thinking about Hannah, I guess.”

Her chest tightened. “Yeah…yeah, me too,” Sam admitted.

Ashley shook her head and began scrubbing a butter knife. “I just…can’t believe any of this.”

“Meeee neither.”

“It wasn’t even that big of a _deal_. Like, come on.”

Her gaze snapped back to Ashley’s profile with the same sort of quickness antelope showed in nature documentaries, sensing an oncoming lion attack. She narrowed her eyes slightly— _just_ slightly—but said nothing.

Mouth wrinkling into a tiny pout, Ashley continued, more to herself than to Sam. “Was she even _thinking?_ She _knew_ how bad the storm was going to be…and it’s not even like it was that _bad_. Josh did _way_ worse to me and Chris the other night, and you didn’t see _us_ like. Jumping out of windows or running into the snow…”

Up until that precise moment in her life, Sam had always thought the phrase ‘biting one’s tongue’ was only meant as a metaphor. As she chomped down on her own, refraining from responding, she realized that _perhaps_ it could be used literally as well.

Unfortunately, there was no way for Ashley to see what Sam’s bicuspids were or were not up to. No, she was already back in her own head, her mouth moving of its own accord, turning her nervous energy and roiling guilt into a breathless tirade. “It’s just so _stupid_ , and it doesn’t make any _sense_. This is a huge freaking mansion! She could’ve run upstairs! She could’ve locked herself in any of the seven _thousand_ rooms here! But no! Instead, she just…” struggling to find the words, Ashley threw her arms out to her sides, “ _Flings_ herself out into the middle of the woods! During a _snowstorm!_ It was the _stupidest_ thing she could’ve done, and she went ahead and did it anyway!”

Something inside of Sam didn’t _snap_ so much as _explode_. It had been a long day. A long day of hiking up and down the mountain, of breathing icy air, of being blasted in the face with snow. A long day of _not_ finding Hannah and Beth. A long day of trying to tamp down the burgeoning _horror_ that they would _never_ find them. A long day of doing everything in her power to keep her emotions in check. What had been a crack in her cool façade split into a gaping chasm, and into it fell the last of her patience. “And what if it had been _you_ , Ashley?” She rounded on her, shoulders taut and lips pressed so hard against her teeth that she began to taste copper. “What if the four of them had pulled that little ‘prank’ on _you?_ What would _you_ do?”

In the blink of an eye, Ashley had recoiled as if Sam had raised a hand to her, eyes wide at the sudden shift in emotional dynamics between them. For a second, she had all but forgotten she’d been speaking aloud. “Wh…they…they wouldn’t have.” Her face was very hot, her tongue feeling too heavy and clumsy to push out the words she wanted. It became _imperative_ that she look anywhere but directly _at_ Sam, but already she could feel the cold fingers of dread forcing their way down her throat and through her chest, reaching for her stomach. This was what she did—what she _always_ did—she just kept talking and talking until it was too late to dig herself out of the hole she’d dug. And this was a deep one.

“Oh no?” Sam asked, dimly aware of an urge to reach out and _shove_ Ashley into the sink or _punch_ her right in her face. The feeling was fleeting, alien and terrible in its intensity, but its ghost remained tingling in her fingertips. “ _Why_ wouldn’t they, Ashley? Because you think they _only_ make fun of Hannah? Because you think they _don’t_ make fun of _you?_ ” It was unfair, and she knew it the second she said it, but she found she didn’t much care, just then. What had happened to the girls had been unfair too, and Ashley didn’t seem to care very much about _that_.

Cheeks growing redder and redder, Ashley slowly shook her head, knotting her fingers in the too-long sleeves of her sweatshirt. “They don’t. Not…not to my _face_ …” she managed to mutter, wincing inwardly at both the ease of her own pathetic admission and the fury radiating off of Sam. “They wouldn’t…they…” She squirmed and tried to will herself to dissolve into the floor. “I don’t…I don’t like Mike. So they—”

“Okay.” Like a crack of thunder, Sam clapped her hands once, causing Ashley to flinch away again. “Let’s say that this had nothing to do with Mike! Let’s say one of them had a crush on _Chris_ , huh? How about that? Let’s say _that_ , instead.”

She _did_ look up, then, eyes wide with more surprise than fear. As uncomfortable as the situation was, the hypothetical was almost ridiculous enough to tear through the horrendous tension between them. Ashley found herself meeting Sam’s gaze again, her expression a strange mix of incredulity and discomfort; it was the sort of face, Sam would think later, that people might make if told to consider their grandparents’ sex lives.

“What do you think would’ve happened _then?_ ”

At her sides, her fingers tightened into further into fists around the fabric of her sleeves. Backed into the corner as she was, Ashley felt a flare of something impossibly hotter than her shame begin to spike its way up from her gut. “They never _would_ have!” she snapped, body so wracked with adrenaline that Sam could see her _literally_ shaking where she stood. “And even if they _did_ , _I_ wouldn’t have fallen for it!”

“You wouldn’t, huh? You wouldn’t?” Sam narrowed her eyes and closed the space between them, feeling Ashley shrink away from her. “So you pick up a note on the table and see it’s from Chris,” she started, grabbing the sponge from off of the counter as though in example, “And it says something like ‘ _Hurr durr, hey Ash, you looked really hot tonight, come meet me in the guest room,_ ’ you want me to believe for one second— _for one second!_ —that you’re not hightailing it to the guest room?” She slammed the sponge back down and it made a sickening squelch. “ _That’s_ what you’re telling me?”

Despite her very best efforts, Ashley’s lower lip had started trembling. She managed to keep her gaze angrily fixed on Sam’s for another instant before it dropped again, her vision beginning to double with welling tears. “I _wouldn’t_.” Her voice was caustic, but there was no hiding the waver it had taken on. “I _wouldn’t_ , because I would _know_ someone was setting me up! People don’t just _say_ stuff like that! I wouldn’t have _done anything!_ ”

Sam set a hand on her hip. “So you _don’t_ just do whatever Chris and Josh say, then? You _don’t_ just follow them around? Because that’s sort of the impression I’ve been getting ever since I _met_ you. It’s _definitely_ been the impression I’ve been getting all weekend, I can tell you that much.”

There was no furious retort that time—even Ashley knew there was no arguing the point. She kept her eyes wrought to the floor, trying to blink back the angry tears threatening to spill hot over her cheeks. “I wouldn’t have _taken my top off_ ,” she said sharply, the disdain in her voice scratching at the back of Sam’s mind like nails on a chalkboard. It had clearly been meant as some sort of affront, an insult, but if its mark was meant to be _Sam_ , it didn’t even come close to landing.

Her response was immediate. “You sure about that, Ashley?”

Head snapping back up, Ashley fixed her with a withering glare. “Chris would _never_ —”

“Mmm, that’s not answering the question I asked, actually.” She raised both of her eyebrows appraisingly, watching her reaction. Sam was a pacifist by nature, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t hold her own when it was needed. Ashley wasn’t the _only_ one who could fling barbed insults around.

That time, something _did_ land.

Ashley watched her for a second longer before huffing out a furious, childish sound of defeat. She stormed her way out of the kitchen and into the hall. To her credit, she stayed true to her word, grabbing hold of the banister as she took the stairs two at a time instead of running out the back door into the snow. Even blinded by the tears that had finally overtaken her, she wove through the third floor with practiced ease, following the path she’d taken hundreds of times before.

The lodge’s upper library was silent, the air thick with dust and the vague vanilla smell of old books. Usually, it was the place she went when she needed a moment to collect herself or detox from too much socializing or even just to pass the time while the guys entertained themselves with whatever stupid obsession they had at the moment. It was the one place in Blackwood Pines that didn’t see many visitors (if any at all), and simply being there, surrounded by bookshelves, was typically all that she needed to find some sort of comfort. But just then, there was no comfort to be found.

Her shaking legs got her as far as the table before she outright collapsed into a chair. Ashley crumpled over the table, burying her head in her arms as the dam broke. She wept openly, her breath making the air around her hot, her face sticky with sweat and tears.

Sam had been right—because of _course_ she’d been right—and in that moment, Ashley _hated_ her for it. She hated _herself_ for it, too.

***

**4:26pm**

“Look, I’m not trying to say it’s a _good_ thing, cuz like…obviously it’s not. I just think—hey, will you just hang on a sec? I just think it’s _better_ that we have a _bunch_ of people looking now, that’s all.” If he had to guess, Chris thought Josh had heard maybe a third of what he’d been trying to say for the past ten minutes. _Maybe._ He’d been following him close on his heels as he made a strange loop around the lodge, picking shit up and throwing shit out—not entirely unlike the frantic cleaning Ashley had just been interrupted from, upstairs.

The difference was clear, though: Josh was fucking _pissed_. Not pissed in a way most other people would’ve recognized, had anyone been near enough to witness the two of them, but pissed in the very particular way Josh had refined over the years. It was a _quiet_ sort of fury, made obvious by jerking hand motions and wrinkling at the corners of his eyes. Each time he lifted a balled napkin or stained paper plate from the ground and put it into the large trash bag he was dragging, the action somehow carried the same weight as a punch.

“The rangers know this place as well as we do—probably _better_ , even!” Chris stopped trying to follow him then, realizing how futile the effort was, and instead stood leaning against the door to the projection room. It was _bizarre_ to think that it had only been a day ago that they’d all been sitting down there, throwing popcorn at each other and groaning each time Vin Diesel delivered some gruff, edgy line about cars and racing and…whatever the fuck else the _Fast & Furious_ movies were about. “And they probably have infrared cameras and shit…they at least probably know something about _tracking_ , don’t you think? Even with the snow. I bet they get called up to help find people all the time! It’s a big mountain, and—”

“Stop. Talking.”

He stopped immediately, snapping his mouth shut before breathing a sigh through his nose. For a minute, he just watched Josh make his deliberate back-and-forth through the seats of the screening room. When it became apparent that no, he was neither going to look Chris’s way or say anything else, he dropped into one of the seats and let his head loll back. The combination of his meds, the hot shower, the freezing walk, and _time_ had lessened the agony of his migraine, but it was still thrumming warningly behind his eyeball. He took his glasses off and closed his eyes, scrubbing at his face with a hand as he listened to the rustling of Josh and his trash bag.

Josh kicked one of the beanbags back into shape as he threw another can into the trash, keeping his eyes low and his jaw grit tightly. The uncomfortable worry that had been itching at the back of his mind all day had blossomed into something bigger, badder, and toothier. It had never _once_ occurred to him that they wouldn’t be able to find the girls. Hell, it hadn’t occurred to him that the girls wouldn’t come back _on their own_.

Those sisters of his—those wild and crazy sisters—well it sure looked like they were just chock full of surprises, weren’t they?

And that was to say _nothing_ of all their friends. All their _so-called_ friends, really. They were full of surprises too, it seemed.

Surprises, surprises, surprises.

For someone who loved jumpscares and twist endings as much as he did, Josh was coming to realize that he really, truly _despised_ surprises.

There was something else bothering him, though, something he couldn’t quite put a name to yet, something that had been dancing on the very edge of his consciousness all day long, just out of reach. It hadn’t quite taken shape, but if Chris kept yapping, as he was so prone to do, Josh worried _he_ might hit on it first. The thought made him grimace even further.

At about the same time Ashley was banging through the library’s door upstairs, Josh shouldered open the door leading to the hallway, staring straight ahead into the darkened corridor as he let the trash bag trail behind him.

Chris cracked an eye at the noise, immediately back on his feet. If there was _one_ room in the lodge Josh didn’t need to be spending any time in alone…he figured it was the guest room. “Josh, come on, man—"

“I said stop talking,” he replied tonelessly, walking into the room and casting a look around. He hesitated turning the lights on, instead taking it in as Hannah would’ve. His eyes narrowed at the thought as his gaze flicked to each of the others’ hiding spots. Emily and Jessica under the bed, Matt in the armoire, and _Ashley_ in the alcove. The corner of his mouth tightened against his teeth.

Unaware that he was ruining some sort of moment, Chris flipped the light switch and the room immediately filled with warm yellow light. “No one was really… _in_ here. I don’t think there’s gonna be any trash to—”

Josh turned to look at him, and Chris fell silent again, eyes plaintive.

“Do you…” he began, each word slow and measured and precise, “Have _any_ idea…what is about to go down, here?” When Chris didn’t answer, save to let his shoulders drop another inch or so, Josh continued. “ _My parents_ are being contacted as we fucking speak. You get that, right? You gotta get _that_ much.” His free hand moved up to rake through his hair. “And you know who gets to _deal_ with them, Cochise? Eh? Tell me. Who gets to deal with them?”

He let his gaze drop as he realized Josh was _actually_ waiting for an answer. “You,” he nodded. “I _get_ that, but we’re—”

“Mom is going to… _lose it_ ,” Josh said, eyes going glassy as it played out in his head. “And I mean in that the _classical_ sense—think hysterics, think fainting couches, think wailing _‘My babies, my babies, my babies!’_ over and over and over.” He punctuated each ‘over’ with a jerk of the bag. “Then there’s good old Bob. Know what Bob’s gonna do? I sure do. First of all, he’s not gonna show, not when he’s ‘on schedule,’ so at least I don’t have to worry about watching his fat fucking face turn five different shades of purple _while_ he’s screaming at me. And honestly, thank God for that, because I get so _tired_ of watching those jowls jiggle like they do when he’s mad. At least I can hold the phone away from my face when he gets too loud, this way…so I guess _that’s_ a silver lining. Ooh, but see the thing is, I get _two_ lectures from him—a pincer attack! Because not _only_ will I have failed at _‘protecting my sisters like older brothers are_ supposed _to do,’_ ” he said, doing a startlingly good impression of his father in the process, “But hoo boy, this is _not_ the kind of publicity that _Washington Pictures, Incorporated_ needs.”

Without any warning, Josh turned on his heel and heaved the bag along with him, storming back out of the guest room, through the hall, and out of the cinema again. The move was so unexpected that Chris was left to flounder for a second before snapping the lights back off and scurrying after him.

He had already reached the second floor by the time Chris had been able to catch up with him. Josh tossed the bag to one side of the staircase, oblivious to both the way it ricocheted off of one of Emily’s faux leopard skin bags (she and Jessica both had been packed up and ready to go since they’d gotten back) and how badly he’d startled Sam (still buzzing as angrily as a shaken up hornet’s nest in front of the kitchen sink). In an unintentional show of subconscious synchronicity, he stormed up the stairs in much the same way Ashley had only minutes before, following roughly the same path as well.

“Dude, it’s not…they’re going to _find_ them!” Chris stumbled for a moment on the stairs, remembering in that split-second that he had, in fact, been hiking all day, and compensated for the shaky muscles of his legs by grabbing hold of the railing. “This is _shit!_ And it sucks, and it’s fucked up, and it-it’s _scary!_ But people don’t just _disappear_ from the world. There are only so many places they could’ve gone, and—”

“And we went to _all of them!_ ” Whirling back around, Josh banged the heel of his hand against his bedroom’s doorframe, sending a loud _thud_ ringing through the silent hallway. “Where the _fuck_ else could they look? Where the _fuck_ else could they _possibly_ find them?!”

“I don’t…the—there’s still the sanatorium! And the mines—”

“ _No one goes in the mines!_ They’ve been boarded up for fucking _decades!_ ”

“Okay, but…still the sanatorium, and like…we didn’t get to the watchtower! And…” His hands were moving of their own accord as he scrabbled for any sort of metaphorical purchase. “I jus—look, the rangers know _everything_ there is to _know_ , up here!” He stuttered over his words, nothing coming out half as persuasive or as comforting as he’d hoped. “Josh,” Chris finally managed, shoulders slouching with exhaustion. “I know shit’s bad right now, but bro, it’s gonna turn out _fine_. I know it.”

“Yeah, well. Got some news for you, _bro_.” Josh opened the door to his bedroom before turning around to face Chris again, face caught somewhere between rage and terror. “Shit’s _already_ pretty fucked.”

Chris made a move to follow him into the room, but Josh shut the door before he could, the fragile _click_ of the lock echoing throughout the space like a thunderclap.

***

**6:15pm**

For the rest of the night, time passed like cold syrup. The rangers were out setting up a perimeter—whatever that meant—beginning to mark off the most likely paths the girls might’ve taken, leaving the rest of them stewing in the lodge. Josh hadn’t left his room in hours, and the resulting vibe of the place was just… _bad_. No one wanted to eat. No one wanted to talk. Even Jessica and Emily, _known_ for their hushed asides, had made a point to remain almost stonily silent. There were only murmurs once it was discovered that the lodge’s phone line was back up again, and even then, discussion was kept to figuring out who was going to call their parents first.

No one was going to be going to class, tomorrow, it seemed.

When all the others had taken their turns on the landline and retreated back upstairs under the pretense of packing up their things ( _again_ ), it was just the three of them sitting on the sectional, hesitant to meet each others’ eyes.

“Guess I’ll go next…” Sam heaved herself up from the couch with a grunt of effort, her legs unbearably sore from all the searching. She walked into the dining room and shut the door behind her, leaving Chris and Ashley alone in the great room. She knew she’d be glad for the privacy, but outwardly she was still bristling with frustration. With _hurt_. It had been _years_ since she’d had to do anything well and truly _alone._ Hannah had _always_ been right there, right next to her, Beth none too far off. But now? Now it was just _her._ Just Sam. The thought of picking up that phone alone, dialing her dad’s number alone, and then _explaining_ to him what was going on _alone_ …it was torturous.

In the great room, they weren’t faring much better. Unable to help himself, Chris’s eyes kept flicking up the stairs to the landing as though expecting Josh to have emerged from his room. Ashley had leaned herself against the back of the couch, chin on her arm, staring vacantly through the slats of the windows at the lights flashing through the snow. They didn’t talk, they didn’t move, and really they didn’t do much except pretend they couldn’t hear Sam’s voice begin to crack through the dining room door. Sam didn’t seem the sort, they thought, who would want other people to acknowledge her moments of vulnerability.

Ashley sighed quietly.

In return, Chris glanced her way, but was met only with the back of her head as she continued to stare out the windows.

And that’s how they stayed for the better part of ten minutes, looking like some anachronistic Renaissance painting, remaining perfectly still for all the time it took Sam to tell her dad that Beth and Hannah were lost, she wouldn’t be coming home for a few days at least, and also, if he was able to get some time off, she would really, _really_ like it if he could come up to the lodge. They only moved again when the door to the dining room opened, turning to watch Sam slide out and gesture vaguely towards the doorway before she too disappeared up the stairs.

“And then there were two.” Ashley let her head roll onto her other arm as she looked out the window one last time.

Chris let out another long sigh before he stood, nodding towards the dining room. “Whaddya think? You want to go first?”

Slowly, she unfolded her legs out from under her, looking to the door as if it were full of revving chainsaws. “Mmm…your parents are probably more freaked out. Maybe _you_ should go first.”

“Yeah, but you have _school_ in the morning. Gonna need to be called out. So _you_ should probably go first.”

“Your dad had that thing with his heart last summer, though. You shouldn’t freak him out more than necessary.” She looked up at him, he looked down at her, and for the briefest moment, they shared a sad, tired smile. “We’re also assuming that they’re not all together, calling the police right now.”

“A good point. A _real_ good point.” Taking the initiative, Chris headed for the door first, pleasantly relieved but hardly surprised but when he glanced over his shoulder to find Ashley still right behind him.

She shrugged. “I got your back if you got mine.”

He snorted a muted laugh. “You know I do.” Picking up the phone from its dock, he stared down at the buttons, cringing slightly. “Can you like…I don’t know, _avert your gaze_ for a sec while I do something embarrassing?”

Ashley raised an eyebrow, sitting herself down on one of the cushioned chairs at the table. She was silent for a moment. “‘Avert my gaze?’ What co…oh my God.”

“Ash please, today has already been bad enough.”

“Chris, holy cow. Are you actually about to _look up_ your own parents’ phone numbers?”

“I haven’t used a landline since I was like…five! Speed dial was invented for a _reason_ , and…” he groaned in defeat, pulling his cellphone out and scrolling through his contacts before finding his dad’s number and dialing it. “If you tell anyone you saw me do that, I’ll deny it.”

She rolled her eyes but said nothing, looking up at the disconcerting chandelier hanging from the ceiling. It was made of antlers, which had never sat particularly well with her for a whole _list_ of reasons, really. Between it and the huge, twisted ball of metal hanging in the great room, she couldn’t help but wonder what kind of decorator the Washingtons had hired. Or how much they’d been paid for their work.

He leaned against the table next to her, breath coming out in quiet, rhythmic little whistles as he waited for someone on the other line to pick up. “Hey Dad, I—”

Ashley looked up, leaning her cheek against her hand as she watched Chris’s face briefly flash through every emotion known to man.

“Hi Mom. Yeah, I—no I’m fine. Yeah, I—Ash is fine too,” he added, awkwardly making a move to angle his face away from her, if only slightly. “Josh is, uh…Josh is fine. But look, we—oh, hi Jamie.”

And there it was. She waited until Chris glanced back at her from over his shoulder, and she mouthed a silent ‘I told you so.’

“Is Linda there too? Oh.” His lips tightened, signaling to Ashley that the answer was ‘no.’ “It’s, um…it’s a long story, Mom. I think I’m gonna…I’m gonna put you guys on speakerphone for a sec, actually. Hang on.”

***

**Monday, February 3, 2014**  
**8:11am**

First thing in the morning, Melinda Washington and Colleen Hartley arrived at the lodge, both bundled up in their coats and pale with worry.

The strangest thing to see was how very quickly the group—all _eight_ of them—gave up any pretense of maturity for the familiar comfort of _parents_ taking control. As if a switch had been flipped, attitudes were gone, squabbles were pushed onto the back burner, and everything became a chorus of ‘yes’es and ‘no’s and ‘please’s.

Josh’s prediction of Melinda’s hysterics didn’t quite pan out: Though it was impossible to tell what she’d done on the long trip up, she maintained a quiet, stoic sort of dignity once she was in the lodge. He couldn’t bring himself to be alone with her for too long, though, and was unspeakably grateful that Colleen had come along to serve as a sort of buffer.

Melinda spent the majority of the day talking with the rangers and, once they arrived, police. Colleen took charge in helping the others make their travel arrangements, making call after call to the bus service and rent-a-cars and other parents.

In some upsetting way, it felt almost like a school field trip gone bad. Real bad.

There was a renewed sense of hope in the lodge, though, now that there were _real_ adults handling the situation. Now that the authorities were there, now that there were parents among them, now that pictures of Hannah and Beth had been handed out and the Washington property had been encircled, it seemed so much more likely that they would be found and brought back.

And while they weren’t brought back that day, everyone felt _sure_ the twins would be back the next day.

*******

**Tuesday, February 4, 2014**  
**10:45am**

Matt and Jessica were the first to leave, climbing into the bus at the base of the mountain shortly after the sun rose. Along with Ashley, they were the only ones of the group still in high school, where absences from class actually _meant_ something.

Mike and Emily stayed a few hours later, helping with another sweep of the property into the mid-afternoon. They left after lunch, Mike offering Josh an encouraging, if slightly uncomfortable, pat on the shoulder with promises of coming back up if they needed more help. “Not that you _will_ ,” he added with a nervous cough. “Cuz there’s _no way_ they’re not finding them today.”

With everyone else gone, the lodge felt more like a mausoleum than a resort—footsteps echoed too loudly, floorboards creaked without anyone walking over them, and they were left to tend to their own wounds, throbbing with anxiety and insult.

Jamie Brown arrived sometime after dinner, eyes rimmed preemptively red. She, Colleen, and Melinda spent a lot of time in the sitting room just off of the kitchen, talking in low voices and holding warm mugs, if only to have something to occupy their hands.

Sam wanted nothing more than for _her_ dad to walk through the door next. She wanted her dad, she wanted Beth, she wanted _Hannah_ , she wanted _anyone_ who was a part of her normal life. Chris and Josh and Ashley had _their_ moms and _their_ best friends (hurt as their feelings were), and some childish little part of her ached with despair, knowing that she could have neither. All she could do was insert herself into _their_ circles, now, and hope for the best.

Really, all _any_ of them could do was hope for the best. **  
**

Not that it would do much good. The search party did not find the girls that day.

***

**Wednesday, February 5, 2014**  
**9:24pm**

Or the next day.

***

**Thursday, February 6, 2014**  
**11:19pm**

Or the next.

***

**Friday, February 7, 2014**  
**8:53pm**

By Friday, no one was talking to anyone else. The only real exceptions were Chris and Ashley, who seemed to be having their own confidential conferences anytime there was no one else around to hear; the second another person walked too close, they would immediately grow quiet, looking down at their hands or phones with hooded eyes.

Sam’s feelings were still raw and throbbing from Sunday. It was the weirdest thing—even though her problem was _absolutely_ with Ashley, she found it _impossible_ to talk to Chris. In a way, they almost felt like the same person. Two sides of one unit. Irrational or not, she realized she was pissed at _both_ of them. She felt _hurt_ by both of them. She missed Hannah _so badly_.

Josh was too angry to be around any of the other three for too long, much less any of the parents. While he’d been wrong about Melinda losing her shit, he had been absolutely _clairvoyant_ when it came to Bob’s reaction. He’d gotten his ass handed to him in all sorts of new and exciting ways over the phone, and the combination of that and everything else going on in the lodge had been rubbing and rubbing and rubbing at him, eating away layers of skin like sandpaper.

Everyone was sucking down the same cocktail of sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion, and worry—and it was _not_ a good mix.

The sun had only begun to set when Scott Giddings arrived at the lodge; it was full dark by the time Al Hartley was able to join them all.

It was decided that _everyone_ would be going home the next day, regardless of whether or not the girls were found.

“I’m not going _anywhere_ until we know where they are,” Sam said, the most measured and calm of them.

“We can’t just let Josh deal with this _alone_ ,” Chris agreed, petulant and tired and snappish. “That would—that’s not _right!_ ”

“We _can’t_. We _have_ to help.” Ashley had started crying again—she’d been crying a _lot_ , that week—making most of her words all but unintelligible. “ _I_ have to help! It’s my fault—I should’ve _known_ better!” She let Colleen pull her into a tight hug, too tired to fight it.

Jamie sighed, hands on her hips. “I’m pretty sure _everyone_ should’ve known better.”

***

**Saturday, February 8, 2014  
12:05pm**

Trying to sleep in the guest room had been a mistake. Not _just_ because of the prank, but for a whole host of other reasons: the sounds of people walking overhead, the draft from the hallway, the shadows that played across the walls…

Still, it had seemed a better option than bunking in Hannah’s room.

Sam suspected it was going to be another night of pretending to sleep. She’d read on the internet somewhere that it was the next best thing to _actually_ sleeping, and while she trusted its veracity about as much as she doubted every conspiracy theory her Aunt Connie posted on Facebook, it was all she had just then. The thought of the long trip back home, the bus ride, the driving…already it was enough to make her carsick. Maybe she’d be able to sleep through most of it.

If she was _ever_ able to sleep again.

By some miracle, she had managed to find herself lost in the cottony space between waking and sleep, still terribly aware of the room around her, but beginning to doze. Her breath had evened out, her heart had slowed, and at the exact moment where she thought she might actually fall asleep…there was a quiet knock on the guest room’s door.

She opened one eye at first, trying to make sense of the shadows on the ceiling. Sam grimaced slightly as she turned to look at the door, trying to figure out whether she had _actually_ heard something, and who might need her at that time of night. “…yeah?” she called, sitting up in bed and tugging the blankets to cover her pajamas as she did so. There was a pause that stretched on long enough to make her think she _had_ imagined the knock after all, and then the door slowly opened from the other side.

“Um…hey,” Ashley said, her silhouette only just visible against the dim light creeping down the stairwell from the great room.

Sam eyed her uncertainly for a time, slowly leaning back to rest against the headboard. “Hey.”

It was almost impossible to make out Ashley’s expression given the lack of light, but her body language spoke volumes of her anxiety. She lifted a ghostly arm and adjusted her hair, if only to give her hand something to do. “I thought…uh…” A small, deflated sigh. “Can we talk, maybe?”

An uncomfortable weight settled into Sam’s stomach at the question; had someone actually taken the time to sit her down and ask what could’ve _possibly_ made her feel even worse that week, her answer likely would’ve been something along the lines of ‘Ashley Brown could ask me to jam about my feelings with her.’ Still, she reached over to the bedside table and clicked the lamp on, illuminating the room with a warm, yellowish glow. “ _Sure_ ,” she said, realizing the second she said it that her voice had held more bite than was perhaps fair. Even though she hadn’t been looking directly at Ashley as she said it, she had seen her fold into herself a bit in her periphery.

After watching her earlier with the others, Sam couldn’t help but feel a _little_ sorry for Ashley. But it was just that—a _little_.

“Okay…” Ashley finally stepped over the threshold, going to great pains to close the door as silently as possible behind her. Once it clicked, she turned back to Sam, finding it particularly difficult to hold her gaze for more than a moment or two. “I really…I really wanted to say I’m sorry.” She paused, eyes downcast as she nervously licked her lips. “And I get it if it’s like…too late for me to say it, or if you don’t even want to hear it from me, or whatever…but I just…I know I need to apologize, and I wanted you to know that.” She chanced a quick look at her, the corners of her mouth tightening into a sad, nervous shape that could’ve been a smile in a past life.

From the bed, Sam continued to watch her, keeping her face as neutral as she could manage. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but this…wasn’t it.

“Um.” The waver was back in Ashley’s voice, making her sound vaguely like a little kid with a stuffy nose. “I’m really sorry…for everything I said. About…about Hannah. It wasn’t fair. Not even a little. I was…really tired, and really mad, and really scared, and…really _guilty._ Like, incredibly guilty. And I just snapped. I shouldn’t have.” She looked back up at Sam even though it was very much the hardest thing she’d ever willed herself to do. “And…I shouldn’t have needed you to say…all of the stuff you said for me to really _get_ how shitty I was being. It shouldn’t have taken you telling me to imagine myself in the situation to get it—it really shouldn’t have. And I kind of…seriously hate that it’s what made me see it.” She sighed, a small, watery sound, before letting her hands drop to her sides. “I’m just… _really_ sorry, Sam. For everything.”

As much as she had wanted to hold out, grasping her righteous anger like a life preserver, Sam felt her resolve dissolve. Something in Ashley’s voice had caused her throat to tighten, her eyes to sting. She cleared her throat as passively as she was able to manage, nodding all the while. “Thanks.” There were other things she had wanted to say, but she was so _scared_ her voice would crack.

“I’ve been crazy worried about like…Josh being mad at me and whether people were going to blame me that I just…I didn’t even like…stop to _think_ about other people, and…” She reached up, rubbing at her raw eyes with the heels of her hands. “It just hit me that they were your _best friends_ , and I don’t…I don’t know how I’d still be _sane_ if I lost the guys, even though they’re _morons_ , and the more I _thought_ about it, Sam, the more I just…” Ashley dropped her hands again, her motions feverish. “I’m just so, _so_ sorry, Sam. You don’t deserve _any_ of this, and I…I needed you to know that I’m sorry. I don’t…” she struggled to find her words, unused to grasping for them. “I don’t want to add to your hurt.”

It wasn’t quite right, grammatically or syntactically, but it turned out to be _precisely_ what Sam needed to hear.

Any anger she’d still been nursing disappeared in a puff of smoke, the space it left in her chest quickly filling with something unnamed. Sam watched Ashley’s profile for a moment before making her decision, suddenly very sure of what she needed to do. “Hey, do you…maybe wanna just crash in here tonight?”

Ashley turned to her quickly enough to make herself dizzy, examining Sam’s face for any sign of a joke. When she realized there _was_ no joke, she blinked in obvious surprise. “You…want me to? After…everything?” she asked tentatively, eyebrows drawing close together.

Scooting over to one side of the bed, Sam reached over and turned the comforter down before patting the mattress. “I think…both of us could use a little company, after the week we’ve been having, don’t you?”

An actual smile tugged at one side of Ashley’s mouth. She breathed out a tiny, relieved sound through her nose before sliding into the bed next to Sam, pulling the covers back up and over her. “Yeah, I do.” Without needing to be asked, she stretched her arm back out and turned the lamp off, nestling herself deeper into the covers once the room darkened again, lit by the soft blue-grey light of the snow-filled sky outside.

There was the usual sleepover brand of discomfort while the two tossed and turned to find their most comfortable spots, and had they not been so tired, both might’ve actually _laughed_ at the ridiculousness of the whole surreal ordeal. Of _course_ they wouldn’t be able to sleep—they hadn’t been able to sleep since the prank had _happened_. There was no reason to believe that night would be any different. Still, they both fell quiet after a few minutes.

The tightness in Sam’s throat didn’t lessen with that time. Knowing full well Ashley was still awake, she tried to clear her throat again, still to no avail, and said quietly, “You know what, uh…you know what _really_ sucks about all of this?”

The apprehension was obvious in Ashley’s voice. “What?”

Smiling bitterly, she turned onto her back, flopping her arms up over top of the comforter. “Uh. I could’ve stopped it.”

Ashley was silent.

Sam stared up at the ceiling, her eyes feeling dry and scratchy the longer she looked. It had been on the forefront of her mind for _days_ , weighing her down like an executioner’s knot. “I could’ve taken the note away,” She said finally, her voice a low whisper. “I could’ve thrown it away or torn it up or I don’t know…I could’ve _eaten it_ before Hannah saw it.” When she inhaled next, she was surprised to feel a hitch in her breath. The sort that served as a harbinger of tears.

There was a beat of silence before the sheets rustled and the mattress bobbed slightly. Ashley rolled onto her side, looking to her with an expression that was best hidden by the low light of the room. “Oh Sam…don’t…don’t do that to yourself.”

“I could’ve,” she reasserted, suddenly aware of how tight her skin felt, how scratchy the thick blanket was. “I could’ve gotten rid of that stupid note the _second_ y—” she caught herself, “—everyone went downstairs, and I could’ve just convinced Hannah to go to bed for the night.”

Ashley’s brow knit and she shifted uncomfortably between the sheets. “You know they would’ve found another way to do it…” she said quietly. “Even if you _did_ get rid of it.” She sighed, letting her eyes flutter shut. “But I’ve been…thinking a lot about that night, too. I should’ve listened to you…I shouldn’t have gone along with them…I could’ve hung back and…” Her lips tightened into a tired slash. “I don’t know. Helped you look for her.”

One of Sam’s arms came up to drape over her face, blocking out the cool light and hiding the tears that had begun to gather at the corners of her eyes. “She wouldn’t have listened to you. Or me. Or Beth. Or anyone. She just…”

Even knowing she couldn’t see her, Ashley nodded anyway. “Really wanted there to be something with Mike.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah…” She rolled onto her back again, folding her hands over her stomach as she lay staring at nothing. “Yeah. It’s…hard to be rational when you’re in that deep.” And _she_ should know—hell, she could’ve written the _book_ on that one. “But Sam, that doesn’t—”

“I could’ve stood outside the guest room door. I could’ve told her not to go in. Shit, Ashley, I could’ve gone in _with_ her and ruined it.” Her lips began to pull back with a sob, and she fought it back as best she could, clamping her arm down even tighter over her face. “I could’ve _stopped_ it.”

“Sam,” she said softly, turning to look at her.

“I could’ve done _a hundred_ different things to stop it. And even if I _couldn’t_ , I could’ve run after them and maybe I could’ve gotten them back to the lodge, or I could’ve kept them from getting lost, or—”

“ _Sam_ ,” Ashley said again, rolling onto her side once more as she reached over and gingerly touched the arm covering her face. “You can’t…it’s…if you keep playing through all all of that, it’s going to drive you out of your mind. None of us…no one could’ve…” she blew out a long breath, swallowing hard. “We can’t change what happened. All we can do is just…hope things turn out.” Her eyes widened to the size of dessert plates when she registered that Sam— _Sam Giddings_ —was actually crying beside her. “Oh crap—Sam I didn’t, I mean, I’m sorry, I—”

Dropping her arm back down to her side, Sam looked to Ashley, trying and failing to restrain the trembling of her lower lip. “Can you hug me?” she asked, shrugging helplessly. “I just…I _really, really, really_ need one.”

Without wasting a moment of thought on it, Ashley reached out, meeting Sam halfway in an embrace made awkward only by their positions on the bed. Sam’s grip was tight and desperate, and Ashley scrambled to shift so she could better return the squeeze. The next moment, Sam had tucked her face against Ashley’s shoulder, her body wracking with silent sobs; Ashley rested her chin atop Sam’s head, hugging her as firmly as she was able. On some level, Sam knew it wasn’t fair—Ashley wasn’t Hannah, wasn’t even _close_ , but just then, in the half-light, she almost _could’ve_ been. That was enough for her.

They fell asleep like that, with tear-stained cheeks and tangled limbs, the spaces between their ribs scooped out and throbbing raw, their bodies forming one unified lump under the covers. All the while, their minds buzzed with the things they _should’ve_ done to prevent the prank, all the things they _could’ve_ done, all the things they _would’ve_ done…but none hurt half so bad as the things they’d _almost_ done. And when they finally gave into the exhaustion of the week, those were the things that haunted them the worst:

The _almosts_.

***

**1:45pm**

Their parents had agreed to let them do one more sweep with the search party before heading down the mountain and beginning their long trips home. It had gone about as well as expected—Sam following after Josh, Ashley following after Sam, Chris following after Ashley. Though the storm had lessened, it was still snowing enough to dull the shape of their footprints as they walked.

Josh had, by all accounts, wanted to go alone. He was talked out. Socialized out. Emotioned out. He was a thunderhead turned human, and he had felt the first real prickles of static at the base of his skull when the others had insisted on going along with him. He had led them down the path they’d taken that first night, when the girls had only been missing for a handful of hours, the trip so much quicker in the full light of day. His throat was raw from calling out their names, his legs shaking from a week’s-worth of maneuvering in the heavy snow, but honestly, he thought he had been doing an _excellent_ job of keeping himself reined in.

They reached the imposing drop off the cliff, and he couldn’t help but feel a flare of irritation when he was the only one with the balls enough to go right up to the edge and look out over the rest of the mountain. “ _BETH!”_ he yelled, both hands cupped around his mouth. Josh paused, listening closely through the echoes of his own voice for any hint of a reply. When there was none, he tried again. “ _HANNAH!_ ” He narrowed his eyes as though it would help him to hear more acutely, straining to make out any sort of sound below his call.

Nothing.

Just like every day before, just like every search before…

Nothing.

He could hear the others behind him, catching their breath, talking in hushed tones, and another flare of indignation heated his face. None of them—not a _one_ of them—was taking this _half_ as seriously as he was, and _fuck_ was it beginning to show.

Misinterpreting his sudden silence as sadness (and understandably so), Chris made the final mistake. With a tone that wasn’t sympathetic so much as it was simpering, he took a step forward, putting himself closer to Josh, but still safely away from the cliff’s edge. “Hey, this was just stop number one, right? We got this. With everyone looking, we’re gonna find the girls in no time, and—”

It was _exactly_ the wrong thing to say.  
  
“Do you know,” Josh began, voice oddly calm, oddly steady, as he looked out at the expanse of mountains before them, “The likelihood…of finding missing people…after a week?” He didn’t turn to them, didn’t want to see their faces. “How about after just _forty eight hours?_ Any ideas? Anyone? Bueller? _Bueller?_ ” He shook his head, suddenly very aware of the hot, heavy, _angry_ tears beginning to well in his eyes, and did his best to scowl them away. “It’s not a fucking _rescue_ mission anymore, you get that, right? It’s a goddamn _recovery_ job. Have _you_ seen any EMTs the past couple days? _I_ sure haven’t! I have, though, seen those neat little vinyl bags everyone’s carrying around, and gee whiz, I sure wonder what _those_ are for, don’t you guys?!” Then he _did_ turn around, all but whirling to face them, arms spread wide, “They’re dead. They’re fucking _dead_. My sisters. Are dead.”  
  
The three of them painted quite the picture: Ashley with her knuckles pressed hard to her mouth as she stared fixedly at her boots, Chris with his brow furrowed and lips tight in a show of concern that Josh was _rapidly_ coming to despise, and Sam with her shoulders slumped and head cocked just to the side as though anticipating a blow. It was one of those rare, terrible moments where the reality of their adulthood throbbed and ached like an open wound, indisputable and undeniable.  
  
They had been _kids_ when the week had begun—granted, kids taking their first tentative steps towards independence—but whatever naivety they’d been clinging to was gone now, lost in the snowstorm, lost amid the trees, lost somewhere cold and dark and hidden in the mountains.  
  
Sam stepped forward first, hand outstretched. “Josh…we don’t _know_ that. They could still—”  
  
He batted her hand away before it could reach him, and he brandished an accusatory finger her way. “We _do_ know. We _do_ , actually. Do you know _how_ we know that, _Samantha?_ ” Eyes wide with righteous, burning fury, he stared her down until she averted her gaze. And so, in turn, he looked to the others, “ _Ashley? Christopher?_ ” His voice was cloying, wavering, and just a _bit_ too loud. “Oh come _on_ now, people! I thought you were the _smart_ ones!” There was an itching in his hands that was making them feel almost alien to him, and he quickly folded his arms and tucked his fingers away before he could lash out again. “Let’s go ahead and pretend it’s _not_ freezing out here. Let’s go ahead and pretend Hannah had a fucking _jacket_ when she ran out. Let’s go ahead and fucking pretend these woods weren’t full of mother…fucking… _wolves_. It’s been. A _week_ since they’ve eaten. They’ve fucking _starved_ , and they’re out there, somewhere, _dead_. My sisters are _fucking DEAD!_ ”  
  
For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of the wind screaming around them, serving as a ghastly sort of punctuation. When it quieted again, there was another sound, a new sound, soft and squeaky, but much too measured to be an animal.  
  
Josh narrowed his eyes to little more than slits, taking a step towards the lot of them. “What? What did you just say?” Anger spiked in his stomach, tasting like old metal on the back of his tongue; he stormed forward until only a step or two from Ashley, openly shoving Chris’s shoulder when he made an attempt to hold him back. Looming over her, Josh put himself right up in Ashley’s face, angling his head to try and force her to look at him. “What. Did you. Just say. _Ash?_ ”  
  
Had she not been wearing gloves, they all would’ve seen the whiteness of her knuckles as she pressed them to her mouth, trying desperately to control the quivering of her lower lip. Ashley kept her eyes riveted on the ground, furiously blinking back tears as she avoided Josh’s gaze. “Three weeks…” she said, voice little more than a whisper over the wind. She wondered, somewhere in a deep, detached part of her mind, precisely how much of her shaking was due to the _cold_. “People can live…for closer to three weeks without food. So it’s…” she pulled her lower lip between her teeth. “It’s _possible_ …”  
  
“Yeah, see?” Chris finally spoke up, smile tentative and desperate. “We could still _absolutely_ find them, Josh! They could definitely still be there, and with all the ground we’re covering, we’ll find them _way_ before then.” The tension between them was choking, and he scrambled, trying to deescalate the situation the only way he’d ever known how. “For _once_ , a writer’s questionable Google searching pays off!”  
  
As though his head was on a swivel, Josh turned to Chris, incensed. “Do you think this is _funny?_ ”  
  
He seemed to crumple, if only slightly. “Josh…no, of _course_ not. I just…” Chris opened his mouth and then shut it again, trying and failing to find the words. “I don’t think we should just throw in the towel and write them off as dead, man. Ash and Sam are right, the girls could still be _fine_ , they could still be waiting for help, it’s totally possible.” Supplicating, he held his hands out, “And we’re _here_ , and the search party’s _here_ , and no one’s going to stop until they’re _found_.”  
  
“Oh, good, what a relief. Here I was, starting to worry that maybe two underweight suburban girls lost in the bear-ridden mountains might be up shit creek without a paddle. But oh, we’ve got _volunteers_ here, poking at the ground with sticks, so no, no, you’re right. They’re probably totally fine.”  
  
“Bro, I just—”

“I’m not your _bro!_ ” Josh snapped, flinging his arms out to his sides. “Okay?! I’m not your _fucking bro!_ ”

Chris’s face fell, but he said nothing.

“You know what? If you care _so much_ about all this, if you care _so much_ about my sisters, then like…where the fuck were _you_ when everyone was pulling their shitty little prank, huh?” His anger was _palpable_ , seeming to warm the air between them all. “What the fuck were _you_ doing that was so important that you couldn’t stop _that_ bullshit, huh?!”  
  
Mouth opening and closing as he struggled for his words, Chris blinked in disbelief. “I was…dude I was out cold!”

“Yeah. Yeah you fucking were. A fat lot of help _you_ are. What a _good fucking friend_.”

Chris gaped, absolutely unable to formulate any sort of response. It was Ashley who stepped in, surprising even herself. “So were _you!_ ” she said, voice growing nasally and high with stress. “Don’t yell at _him_ for being knocked out, because you were too! And you’re their _brother!_ ” She noticeably gulped, but didn’t stop, when Josh angled himself back towards her. “If you can blame _Chris_ , then you have to—”  
  
“Oh, and now _you’re_ going to start in on the blame game, huh? You sure you wanna do this right now, Ashley? You wanna do this like this? Okay. Okay, fine, let’s do it like this then.” Jaw clenched, Josh grimaced around the words. “Why the _fuck_ are you even _here_ , _Ashley?_ ” He cocked his head to the side as he moved in closer. “You didn’t even hang out with the girls. You weren’t even _friends_ with them. Beth couldn’t fucking _stand_ you, and honestly? I’m not sure even _Hannah_ knew you were _alive_. And that’s fucking _saying_ something.”  
  
Her cheeks were bright with humiliation, but something had changed in Ashley. Whether it was Josh’s volume, his proximity, or his accusation, it was impossible to tell, but the anxious fear in her eyes was suddenly gone. Instead, her stare was almost as cold as the wind whipping their faces raw. To Sam, it was almost startlingly foreign, seeing that sort of firmness on Ashley’s face; the boys seemed much less surprised. It was just a bout of Ash Anger™—a cool fury that accompanied only the most serious of personal affronts. “I’m here to help you find them. Same as everyone else.” Her voice was clipped.

“Don’t pretend like you fucking give a shit—did you even _like_ the girls?” He rounded on her again, all but screaming into her face. “God knows _you_ were the only one here happy enough to join in on the reindeer games, so I’m gonna go with ‘no.’”  
  
Chris cringed hard enough that he had a full-body reaction, subconsciously leaning himself away from the conflict. His eyes flicked from Josh to Ashley and back again but remained quiet. Years of experience had taught him there was no _good_ way to intervene, not when the two of them really got down to brass tacks. It didn’t happen _often_ , but when it _did_ …Briefly, he glanced in Sam’s direction, trying to communicate with his eyes that this was decidedly _not_ worth sticking her neck into.

Had Sam met his gaze, she probably wouldn’t have understood half of what he was trying to convey—it didn’t matter, though, as she found herself wrought to the spot where she stood, staring at Josh and Ashley with stunned silence. In all the time she’d known them, never _once_ had she heard either of them raise their voice in anger, much less seen them posture as if they were going to start throwing punches. True, they had always been in the periphery of her social circle, more acquaintances than full-blown friends, but this? This was…startling, to say the very least.

For a moment, it seemed that Ashley had nothing to say. She just kept glaring up into Josh’s eyes, her lower lip beginning to push out into a childish moue, her hands tight fists at her sides. When she opened her mouth again, her tone was so sharp that _Sam_ felt herself recoil, though it hadn’t been aimed at her. “What do you want me to say? I’m _sorry?_ I’m _sorry_ I was in the room, I’m _sorry_ that I was there, I’ve told you that. I’ve told you that over, and over, and _over_ again since that night, Josh.”

“‘ _Sorry’_ doesn’t bring my _fucking sisters back_ , Ashley.”

Something in her posture shifted, and she became all angles, poised and brittle like a shard of glass masquerading as ice. “No,” she agreed, voice threateningly low. “It won’t. But I can help look for them. I can help try to bring them back.”

Where Ashley’s fury was cold and solid, Josh’s seemed molten, the color rising in his face until his cheeks were nearly purple. “Maybe I don’t fucking _want you here_ ,” he spat, fingers trembling as he threw his arms out to his sides again. “Maybe I’d rather not look at your _fucking face_ , did you think of that one? Did that little possibility ever fucking _occur_ to you, Ashley?!”

“You know what? I am _done_ with getting yelled at.” The words were spilling from her like vomit, her mouth numb from the freezing wind and her own overwhelming surge of emotion, and she found herself powerless to staunch the flow. “I told you I was sorry, but I know that doesn’t matter—know _why_ it doesn’t matter? Because there was literally— _literally!_ —nothing I could’ve done that night that would’ve been right, in your eyes. Nothing! If I built a freaking _time machine_ and went back to that night, what would I do, Josh, what would I _do?_ Would you want me to pass out _shitfaced_ like you and Chris? Probably not, huh, since you’re pissed at him, too!” One of her arms shot out in Chris’s direction, but her eyes never left Josh’s. “Would you want me to run around the lodge, trying to find Hannah and warn her not to go downstairs? Because that’s what _Sam_ did, and you’re _just as mad at her!_ ” She gestured towards Sam that time, each of her movements jerkier than the last. “Should I have run after them, Josh? Should I have run into the frigging storm _with_ them? Would I have done the right thing _then?_ Because I’d like to remind you, _you_ could’ve done that once we woke you up, but you _didn’t_. _You_ were the one who said they’d be _fine_ , and that we should _wait_ _until morning_. So you tell me, Josh, _what should I have done?!_ ”

Sam did look to Chris then, searching for some kind of explanation or solace or assurance, but his eyes were firmly riveted to the ground, lest he accidentally make prolonged eye contact with either of the others.

The mountain was almost painfully quiet.  
  
Josh’s eyes had narrowed to the point where he was all but squinting at her. He sucked a breath through his teeth, adam’s apple working furiously as he tamped down the tirade threatening to burst out of him. “You shouldn’t have come to the fucking party in the first place, is what you should’ve done. You should’ve stayed _home_ , where you _belong_ , away from other human beings, just the way you like it. Did I even _invite_ you, Ashley, or did you just _assume_ you were invited because _Chris_ was coming?” He matched his tone to hers, punctuating the thought by curtly cocking his head to one side. “God knows no one _else_ there was your friend. Not Jessica, not Matt, not Emily, not Mike, not Beth, not Hannah, not _Sammy_ , _none of them_. So why the _fuck_ did you even _come?_ ”  
  
The unflinching veneer she’d been fighting so hard to keep up finally cracked around her as he said it, her eyes red-rimmed and glassy with freshly welling tears she tried to blink back. “No,” she said softly, almost inaudible above the wind. “I wasn’t friends with them. But I’m friends with _you_.”  
  
He bent down, putting his face close enough to hers that a passerby might’ve thought they were about to kiss. “Then. Fucking. _Act. Like. It_.”  
  
A single, fat tear dropped from Ashley’s left eye, rolling down her cheek. A moment later, its twin fell from her right. Still, she didn’t break her gaze from Josh’s. They were both hurt, both angry—hell, _furious_ —but it quickly became obvious that the scales were tipped differently between them. Swallowing hard, Ashley brought a balled fist up, scrubbing at her icy cheek before abruptly turning on her heel and heading back for the lodge. As she retreated, her shoulders seemed to pull impossibly inwards, as though she were willing her skeleton to collapse into itself.  
  
Chris watched her walk away with his brows drawn up and together in concern. He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed his glasses up towards his forehead, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers before dropping both hands to his sides with a heavy breath.

“ _Well?_ ”

He turned back, chest tightening at the expectant look on Josh’s face. “Well _what?_ ”

Josh swept an arm out in Ashley’s direction, swiveling to lean in towards Chris. “Aren’t you gonna go chase after her?” There was another long, tenuous moment of silence as the wind whipped snowflakes in their faces. “You _want_ to. And you always _do_. So what’re you even _waiting for?_ ” He put himself in Chris’s face in much the same way he had closed in on Ashley, and Sam was shocked when Chris actually took a step back.  
  
Unlike Ashley, Chris found he wasn’t able to maintain eye contact for too long; he looked up and away, though his view couldn’t have been more than the unforgiving, grey expanse of sky above them. “Josh…” he said finally, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.

In response, he simply jerked his arm in the direction of the lodge again, “Running out of time, Cochise. At this rate, you’re gonna have to _jog_ to catch up, and that’s not a _great_ look, is it? How often do you see the valiant hero _scuttle_ after his distressed lady love, huh?”

Chris heaved a heavy, silent sigh, but said nothing, opting instead to continue staring pointedly at the sky. Sam had the strangest, most inappropriate feeling that this was as close as she would get in her lifetime to witnessing a public execution. Something in Chris’s expression hinted at the desperation of a man standing at the gallows, ticking down the seconds until his own beheading.

“What are you _waiting for?_ ” Josh continued, cocking his head to the side again as he kept his eyes directly on Chris, the gesture somehow strangely confrontational. “I’m sure it’s eating you up inside, knowing poor, sad lil’ Ash is crying. Again. _Like always_.” He jutted his lower lip out in a mockery of her earlier pout, gaze still frigid as he made loud, dramatic blubbering noises. “So go on. _Go on_. Go run after her like you always do. Be the big man and _comfort_ your not-girlfriend, and reassure her that it’s no big deal that she helped get my little sisters _fucking killed_ , because hey, we _all_ have bad days, right? We _all_ make bad judgment calls sometimes! We _all_ kill our friends’ siblings on occasion, don’t we?”

More silence. The seconds seemed to stretch on like hours between them, made syrupy and thick by the cold.

But slowly, just as Ashley had, Chris let his eyes drop back to the ground, and he followed after her. He kept his pace even and measured, if not particularly brisk, to save himself the indignity of actually _running_ after her, but he could still feel Josh’s gaze drilling holes into the back of his skull. Chris shoved his hands into his pockets and hunched himself against the cold, calling after her only once.

Sam hugged her arms around herself, palms cupping her elbows as she watched them disappear down the snowy path. While his back was to her, she couldn’t help but turn her attention to Josh, watching him carefully. This was the sort of situation she usually excelled at—offering the right words at the right time, sympathetically smiling or frowning when it was most needed—but when he swiveled and _his_ attention was on _her_ , she found herself at a loss. She continued to watch him appraisingly, lips slightly parted as she tried to find something, _anything_ , to say. Her mouth was dry and her throat was tight; she had just seen Josh _decimate_ his two best friends, and she knew perfectly well that whatever he launched at her, she would not be half so prepared for.

He narrowed his eyes, giving her a quick, almost uninterested once-over before his upper lip curled in a grimace. “The fuck are _you_ still doing here?” he asked. Most of the venom was gone, leaving his tone bizarrely flat. Sam wasn’t the only one surprised by that, but Josh didn’t let it show. Instead, he flicked his wrist again in the direction of the lodge. “Get out of my face.”  
  
There was a sudden spark of something (not anger, not really, but _close_ ), maybe indignation, at his flippant dismissal. Sam felt a spike of it in her gut, fraught with the sudden urge to scream at him: _Do you think you’re the only one? Do you think you’re the_ only _person who’s been devastated by this? Are you going to stand there and act like you’re the_ only one _who lost two people who meant_ everything _to them?_

But she didn’t. Sam didn’t say a word. Instead, she regarded him for a long moment, trying to keep her breath even against the pounding of her heart. And then she turned and started for the lodge. She shot one last look over her shoulder, watching as Josh disappeared behind a particularly large tree, feeling her eyes prickle with cold and tears. Sucking her upper lip into her mouth, Sam bit down, trying to concentrate on anything other than the black hole in her chest. Everything _sucked_ , everything _hurt_ , and while she understood implicitly that Josh’s loss was unspeakable, it wasn’t _fair_ that he was acting as though she didn’t care. Hannah had been her best friend since _they’d met_ , freshman year. Beth too. It was like someone had punched their way into her ribs, grabbed hold, and torn all of her insides out…it was like she was suddenly trying to breathe water that had started to freeze over. How _Josh_ , of all people, couldn’t see that, she wasn’t sure.

She was so absorbed in her own thoughts that she almost didn’t notice she had gained on the other two. Chris and Ashley, it seemed, had been waiting for her. Sam paused a few yards from them, the realization taking her aback for a moment. When she matched stride with them, it was Chris who spoke first.

“You okay?” Her expression must’ve been more severe than she’d intended, because he immediately backpedaled. “I mean… _considering_.” As a distraction, he flipped the hood of his jacket up, angling his path just enough to afford Sam space to walk between him and Ashley.

Under their feet, the snow crunched loudly.

***

**Monday, February 10, 2014  
11:30pm**

Josh had been turning his phone over in his hands for the better part of the past two hours, staring blankly at his ceiling. There was a restless energy in his legs that he’d been growing accustomed to over the past few months. It was a side effect of upping his dose, and one of the more palatable ones, but at that moment it made it very difficult for him to parse out how much of the thrumming in his extremities was due to medication and how much was due to feeling like a complete and utter fuckwit.

He had to imagine that it was _mostly_ the latter. Mostly. He had, after all, been something of a colossal dick.

Had the others had it coming? Maybe. Had he been distressed? Definitely. Had he been _justified_ in blowing his top like that? Mmm…jury was still out on that one, but things were looking like they’d probably be voting ‘no.’

When the lodge had been full of everyone and their mothers (quite literally), it had somehow been easier for him to isolate himself. Now that he was, for all intents and purposes, _actually_ on his own, the others back in school and out of the snow, Josh was finding it almost impossible to stop thinking about that last conversation. It was impossible to stop thinking about a _lot_ of things, really. His worry over the girls had turned into full-blown nauseous terror, and every time his mind brushed against that particular line of thought, he realized there was nothing he wanted more than to reach out to someone— _anyone_ —who wasn’t his mother. Now that they were gone, he just wanted to sit with Chris and Ashley, he wanted to talk to Sam, he wanted to hear them reassure him it would be all right and shit would work out and that he wasn’t _alone_ in this. There was _nothing_ he hated more than feeling like he was alone.

It didn’t help that his phone had buzzed once every eight hours or so with a new message from Chris. Each time he checked to see what the newest message said, he felt his stomach clench with a sick combination of discomfort and guilt.

The first flurry had come only a few hours after he’d exploded at the three of them, likely once they’d reached the base of the mountain or gotten onto their bus.

cochise  
  
hey so i just wanted to say sorry about earlier. and like everything else. i really hope you guys find beth and hannah soon cuz like you WILL find them but idk this isn’t coming out how i wanted  
  
uh just really hope you’re ok and i know you’re pissed and you have every right to be but i'm here whenev ok?  
  


It was his _modus operandi_ : Responding to being wronged by trying _harder_ to be a better friend. One of these days, Josh thought, that particular brand of loyalty was going to get Chris in trouble.  
  
The second had come later that night:

cochise  
  
back home and heading to campus  
  
i'll take econ notes for you no worries there and lmk if you won’t be making it to bio lab on fri so i can get you that stuff too  
  
phone’s gonna be on all night  
  


And then even later:

cochise  
  
sorry for all the spam but fr are you ok?  
  


He sighed and tossed his phone a few inches into the air, watching it tumble down before he caught it. He always had such grand plans when he was on his bullshit. Usually they amounted to ‘give everyone the cold shoulder until they realize how much they miss me,’ and usually he ended up feeling like an ass about it after a day. Or in this case, _two_ days. A day and a half? He had lasted longer than he usually did, that much was for sure.

For what felt like the millionth time that night, he swiped to unlock his phone screen, opening up his texts. The words still weren’t coming to him…not in the way he wanted them to, at least. Short of writing out a play-by-play of everything he’d said and done wrong, followed by a stomach-turning description of each and every sordid emotion he’d been dealing with during that week, he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to provide a satisfactory apology.

Ugh. But he _needed_ to. And _wanted_ to. And that was the most frustrating part of it all.

He tapped out of Chris’s text thread, and instead opened the group text with him and Ashley. The cursor in the message box blinked mockingly up at him and he stared back at it.

He tapped out of the group text again.

Letting his phone drop onto his chest, he reached up to cover his face with his hands, groaning loudly into the chilly air of his bedroom. They _still_ hadn’t found the girls. He’d been forced to start coming to terms with the horrible, impossible, devastating possibility that they might _never_ find the girls. It didn’t make sense, and it seemed as though that sort of thing didn’t _happen_ in the 21st century, and yet there he was, realizing that he had begun referring to Hannah and Beth in past tense over the last two days.

How did one explain that to their _friends?_ How did one find the words to describe the complexities of sibling dynamics and attachments to a bunch of only children? _How?_

Josh picked his phone up with a new resoluteness, creating a new conversation entirely. He typed in three contact names before starting to type, refusing to let himself back down again.

3 People  
  
hey so…sorry about all that before  
  
i know i said some unfair shit to all of u and that wasnt cool at all  
  
and i know u guys have been trying to help and i appreciate that  
  
really  
  
obviously shit sucks  
  
and i was…fucking pissed  
  
still am tbh…but not AT u guys  
  
just in general  
  
if that makes sense  
  
i hope everyones back home and idk thawed out lol  
  
fr tho im sorry about the other day and linda and i really appreciate u stickin around for as long as u did to help  
  
cant speak for bob but…no one speaks for that bald fuck lol  
  


Staring at the screen, he tried to think of something else to say, but came up dry. He flipped the phone over so he wouldn’t have to see their replies right away, setting it down on his mattress. This was the worst part of any apology: waiting for the reaction.

Unsurprisingly, he didn’t have to wait too long before the space next to him began buzzing. Josh continued to stare at his ceiling for another minute or two, counting out a fair number of Mississippi’s in his head before picking it back up to see what had been said.

3 People  
  
cochise  
dude omg it’s fine  
this is hard shit man  
emotions are high  
ashley  


He watched warily as Ashley’s name popped up on screen, looming over the ticking ellipsis that signified she was typing something. It disappeared. It came back. It disappeared again. It came back again. Josh took in a deep, apprehensive breath.

3 People  
  
sammy  
Josh…everyones going thru a lot  
Things were bound to get tense after all that time cooped up in the lodge together  
We just want you and Hannah and Beth and your parents to be ok thats all  
ashley  


Ashley and her dots were back again, and gone again, and back again. He knew implicitly that one of two things was happening: Either she was writing a fucking twenty page novel of a response, _or_ she was pissed enough that she kept deleting whatever she had been planning on saying.

Honestly, he wasn’t sure which he’d prefer.

3 People  
  
cochise  
yeah we totally get it bro  
also uh hi i'm assuming that was just sam  
sammy  
Yup its me  
I’m gonna go ahead and assume from all the bros that youre chris and not ashley  
cochise  
hey ash can bro it up w the best of em  
you should hear her when she’s on a roll  
but yeah like sam said we just wanna know you’re ok  
ashley  
Yeah, what Sam said.  
cochise  
you ok? ok-ish?  


He sighed and rolled his eyes back into his head before collecting himself, rolling his shoulders out to exorcise some of the tension he’d been holding there.

3 People  
  
i feel like a fucking asshole  
cochise  
yeah ok but like how is that different from any other day  
ooooh  
need some ice for that sick burn?????  
nah son im frosty the snowman up on this mountain  
gonna have to do better than that  
cochise  
challenge accepted  
sammy  
Phew glad we were able to escape talking about human feelings for more than ten seconds there  
That was awful close  
Nice save boys  


It was a start. And he’d take it.

  
***

**Tuesday, February 11, 2014**  
**4:05am**  
  
Josh woke from an uneasy sleep with sweat dripping down his face and a song stuck in his head. Some stupid, childish nursery rhyme…It had been part of a video he couldn’t quite remember the name of, but which he and the girls must’ve watched hundreds of times growing up; the sort of sing-along dreck that parents threw on during long car rides or rainy days to keep the kids out of their hair. It clicked into place after a second—it was the song that the girls’ music boxes played, the ones he’d gotten them for Christmas a million years ago. As he lay in bed, eyes screwed shut, raking his fingers up into his hair, Josh strained to remember the words that accompanied the melody.

But as hard as he tried, his sleep-addled brain could only produce a detached snippet: _Morning bells are ringing…morning bells are ringing…_ It was stuck on a loop, like an old CD with a scratch repeating over and over and over until he thought his head might burst open. And though he couldn’t remember the rest, something about those morning bells immediately set off _warning_ bells.  
  
Jolting bolt upright, he tore free of his sheets and heavy comforter, the sweat from his dreams now icy in the morning air. Bizarre dreams were a side effect of his meds, so it was nothing new. That was one of the pitfalls with antidepressants, he’d learned…no one told you about the _weird_ side effects until you woke up in the middle of the night, _positive_ that there were millipedes in your pillow. He groaned, shuddering the nervous energy out of his arms and shoulders.  
  
_Morning bells are ringing, morning bells are ringing…_

For a moment, and only just a moment, an image had occurred to him. It had come from the fuzzy place between sleep and waking, where everything felt at once too real and not at all solid, but the details were too vivid for him to write off as some sort of nightmarish hallucination.

His vision had been obscured by…something. He’d only been able to see a sliver of whatever was happening, and there had been a voice…

Josh swung his legs over the side of the bed, dropping his head into his hands as he screwed his eyes shut tightly. This wasn’t happening. It was just a nightmare—just a stupid nightmare brought on by the stress of everything going on. He just needed to lie back down and go back to sleep. Maybe take one of his mom’s sleeping pills, drape a heavy blanket over the window, or…God, what he _really_ needed to do was get that fucking _song_ out of his head.

_Morning bells are ringing, morning bells are ringing…_

He blinked hard, the shapes in his room coming into clearer focus. With a jerky motion, he flipped his pillow over, feeling childish as he did it. It had either been his mom or Colleen who had always said nightmares could be fended off by the cool side of the pillow, but he couldn’t remember which. A lot of his Mom-memories were like that, split evenly between the two. It didn’t matter. He laid his head back down on the pillow, exhaling deeply as he attempted to find a comfortable spot again. Just a few more hours of sleep…he just needed a few more hours of sleep…

The first line of the song came to him then with sudden, horrible clarity.

_Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping?_

His eyes snapped open. All at once, _everything_ came crashing into place: He was in the kitchen, lying flat on the table, head buried in his arms, only something… _someone_ was yanking at his shoulder hard enough to stir him. The cold sweat was back with a vengeance, serving as a nauseating counterpoint to the brutal heat flaring in his stomach and the base of his throat. He didn’t want to remember anymore, didn’t want to think on it, but he had already opened the floodgates, and the images just kept pouring out. It was the table he had seen, mostly, but also a pair of black leggings and the hemline of an oversized, fuzzy grey sweater. He had been dizzy even in his burgeoning consciousness, but even so, the panic in the other’s voice rang out clearly.

_“Shit shit shit…Josh, Josh come_ _on_ _.”  
_

No. Nonononono, he didn’t want this. He didn’t want any _part_ of this—he wanted to lie down and drift back to sleep, he wanted to wake up in the morning and convince himself that this was just another dream, he wanted the song out of his head.

_Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping?_

It played over and over again, repeating onto itself until it may as well have been a _chorus_ of voices singing it. Each time it began again, the words became a little more frantic, a little more high-pitched, and each time, they sounded a little more like _Beth_.

_“You’re_ still _sleeping?! Ugh! Fuck!”_

Josh tried to breathe, but the air he pulled into his lungs felt like scratchy pink insulation clogging his lungs and throat. This was it. This was what he had been trying so hard to ignore, as though pretending it away would mean that it hadn’t happened or that it wasn’t real or that it was just some shitty _Silent Hill_ knockoff manifestation of his guilt.

He’d heard her. He’d _heard_ her, and seen her, and felt her, but he had been so fucking _sloshed_ —more to the point, he’d been fucking drinking on his meds, and he _knew_ he wasn’t supposed to do that shit. He had _known_ they didn’t mix, but he had still just gone whole hog with it, not realizing until he was already lying on top of the table that it had been a mistake, and then…

Fuck.

_Fuck_.

The song kept winding its way around his brain, quieting only as he woke up all the way. The words had turned and warped in on themselves until all he could hear was Beth’s panicked voice above the infantile melody.

_You’re still sleeping, you’re still sleeping…_


	3. Where (everyone goes home)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Relevant warnings for this chapter: Angst, slight body horror, mentions of cannibalism, sexual dubstep, and as always...the author thinking she's funny.

**Friday, February 14, 2014  
4:25pm**

“Well shoot. What’s a pretty young thang like you doing in a place like this?”

Sam felt her entire body cringe at the comment. She found herself sorely wishing that she had put _both_ of her earbuds in while she waited for the bus, if only so she could pretend she hadn’t heard _that_ travesty of a pickup line. Instinctively, her lips tightened into a defensive grimace, but when she actually glanced up from her phone, she groaned audibly. “Is this how you get your kicks? Huh? Antagonizing women at bus stops?”

There was a heavy _thunk_ as Chris unceremoniously dropped his bag next to her on the bench. “I mean…I also like to code and stuff. Maybe play some Mario Kart. _Definitely_ enjoy going hogwild on some Taco Bell from time to time…but actually…now that you mention it…I guess pickin’ up hot babes on public transportation _does_ rank pretty high up on my kicks list, yeah.” He flashed her a grin before sitting down on the other side of his bag. “Not that like, you’re hot or anything,” he added, making a grand show of pretending to be flustered, fingers curling around imaginary pigtails as he avoided meeting her eyes.

“Eh, don’t worry about it.” Sam primly crossed one leg over the other as she looked back down at her phone, scrolling through her music. Quirking an eyebrow, she offered him a sly sidelong glance, “You’re not really my type, anyway.”

“Tell me honestly…is it the nose?”

“Mmm…it’s the _nerd_ , actually.”

“You would not _believe_ how many people tell me that. Usually while I’m trying to pick them up at bus stops, no less.” Chris chuckled to himself before checking his watch. “How long you been waiting all by your lonesome?”

She snickered, finally turning her music off to give him her full attention. “Not too long,” she said as she stowed her earbuds in the front zipper of her bag. “Maybe an hour? Hour and a half? I don’t have Friday classes, so it wasn’t a huge deal.”

“Ah,” he nodded sagely. He had eased himself down into a comfortable slouch atop the bench, but every few seconds, he would crane his head this way or that to try and get a better view of the bus station. To Sam, he didn’t look entirely unlike one of those anxious meerkats from the _Animal Planet_ specials—scanning, scanning, scanning for any sign of movement.

Not one to deprive herself of such entertainment, Sam sat back comfortably, watching Chris become increasingly more agitated. She nestled herself into the divot of her own bag, setting her cheek against her hand like an enraptured moviegoer. Just as the thought _God I wish I had some popcorn_ occurred to her, Chris seemed to realize he was being watched; his brow creased when he took in her shit-eating grin.

“What’s _that_ look about?”

Still slyly smiling, Sam shrugged and averted her eyes. “Nothin’,” she said, voice just a skosh too bubbly to be genuine. Examining her nails with all the subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon villain, she added, “You uh…you looking for someone?”

Chris opened his mouth to answer her before it clicked. Sam watched with nothing short of juvenile glee as his confusion morphed into exasperation—it was like watching his face go through all seven stages of grief in the blink of an eye. “Oh. Oh great. Now I have to worry about _you_ pulling that shit too, huh?”

“Hey,” she started defensively, still laughing to herself. “I think it’s cute.”

“Mhm. I’m sure you do.” He rolled his eyes, turning to look around the bus station again before catching himself. As though to spite Sam, he kept himself from the compulsion. Despite his best efforts, he felt his face growing hotter the longer she stared back at him with that _look_ on her face. “ _Okay_ , know what, maybe I’ll just catch the _next_ bus and meet up with you guys later tonight, instead.”

That only made her smile wider. She didn’t think she had the words to explain it just then, but there was something about being able to laugh at all, after what the past two weeks had been like. _Exhilarating_ wasn’t quite the right word, but it was _close._ Refreshing, maybe. Either way, it had the same effect of taking a sip of water and realizing you’d been _parched_ for as long as you could remember—it was _good_. It was good and she _needed_ it. “No, really, I’m being serious. You two are very, very cute together. I’d even go so far as to say you’re _adorable_.” **  
**

“Cool. Great. Sweet. Okay, so like I said, thinkin’ real hard about just catching that next bus, so if you’ll excuse me…”

Though she knew it was all for show, she pinched Chris’s sleeve between her fingers as he made to stand up, tugging him back down. “Message received. I’ll drop it, I promise!” When his eyebrows shot up in doubt, she snorted, “I _promise!_ Look, I’ll do you one better, actually, and I won’t even bring up the point that it’s Valentine’s Day.”

It was the sort of teasing he was used to, and admittedly it was much easier to stomach than the perpetual gut-punch of discomfort that had been hanging over their heads; for that reason, Chris did his best to pretend it was the cold (and _not_ the prickles of embarrassment) that made him zip his jacket up another few inches. “Gee, thanks,” he jokingly sneered, flinging his arm around wildly until she released his sleeve. “What a pal _you_ are.” Sam laughed again, and he couldn’t help but chuckle quietly as well. It was fucking contagious, is what it was, even if it was at his expense. “But you like…you _get_ that we’re not…we’re…I mean…” He resisted the urge to bite his own tongue. “We’re _just_ friends.”

“Uh huh.” Sam’s smile was wide with amused disbelief.

“This is the _last_ time I try picking up chicks at the bus stop, Mary Mother of God—”

“Nonono, I hear you! I hear you.” She reached out and placed a comforting hand on Chris’s shoulder. Looking up at him, she nodded with a mock seriousness. “ _Definitely_ just friends.”

“Who’s friends?”

They both turned to the sound of the voice, but not before Chris _physically_ felt about ten years drain from his life.

Face flushed from the cold, clearly harried, Ashley braced her hands against the back of their bench, smiling tightly as she caught her breath. “Sorry I’m late—Mom got stuck in traffic.” She breathed a sigh of relief when a cursory glance showed her the bus wasn’t even close yet. “Who’re we talking about?”

“No one,” Chris said, maybe just a second too quickly. He momentarily shot Sam an appraising look, trying to determine whether or not she’d set him up for that, if she’d spotted Ashley from out of the corner of her eye or something. Her secret little smile suggested she had been caught just as off her guard as he’d been, though. “God, did you _run_ here?”

“I wasn’t sure if I was gonna make it! Ugh…” She perked up suddenly, holding a finger up in the universal sign for ‘hold up just a sec,’ flipping the top of her messenger bag open and rummaging around inside. “Uh, I feel like…I should provide some context for this,” she muttered, looking down at something neither Sam nor Chris could see. “Okay, so my mom’s department sometimes gets stuff from textbook publishers to try and get more business, and sometimes they get, uh, _creative_ , so…” There was a rustle as she pulled a sizeable paper sack out from her bag, holding it out to the both of them. “Happy Valentine’s Day? I guess?”

Sam suspiciously looked up at her, then to Chris—who was, she noted, back to being perfectly mortified—then slowly lowered her hand into the bag. She pulled out a heart-shaped lollipop, wrapped in an obnoxiously bright green square of plastic. “Oooh, going old school on us, huh?”

“ _Happy Valentine’s to the World’s Best Professor,_ ” Chris read aloud from the back of the wrapper. He raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Why, Sam…I had no idea.”

“That’s _Doctor_ Sam to you,” she joked, quickly (and surreptitiously) glancing over the ingredients before tearing the wrapper open. “Thanks, Ash! I’m sure we’ll make short work of these.”

“ _I’m_ not,” Ashley sighed, looking down into the bag. “There’re like…a hundred. She _insisted_ I bring them, so…”

“Okay, well…this is embarrassing. I had been _planning_ on _waiting_ until we got to the _lodge_ , but…” Chris sighed and unzipped his own bag, reaching in and pulling out what appeared to be a large dome of tinfoil.

The sucker rolled in her mouth as she twisted her fingers around its stick, watching Chris with a furrowed brow. Her eyes zipped over to Ashley’s, searching for some kind of answer there. “If that’s full of _World’s Best Professor_ candy too, I need you to know I’m _genuinely_ going to lose my shit.”

“I’d appreciate it if you could keep it contained, actually. Honestly, I think I speak for all of us when I say you should probably keep your shit to yourself.” He peeled back a corner of the tinfoil, revealing a plate stacked high with thick cookies. “Stopped by my parents’ place on the way up here, and _surprise_ , Ma had these waiting.”

There was a happy gasp from behind them as Ashley immediately took a cookie, biting into it with the sort of rapture usually only seen in third graders on pizza day. “You win,” she said through a mouthful, “You absolutely win.”

“I wasn’t aware Valentine’s Day was a _competitive_ holiday, but I mean…I’ll take it, I guess.”

A loud chug signaled the arrival of the bus, as well as the rustling of Valentine’s goodies being wrapped up again. Nearly in unison, the three moaned like zombies, heaving their weighty bags up onto their shoulders, preparing to climb in. The hydraulic hiss of the doors sounded, the panel folding inwards to let them on, and they exchanged quick, hesitant glances before Sam took the initiative and marched forward first. Something about the bus felt menacing this time around; they all knew _why_ , of course, but it was still jarring how very quickly they had gone from palling around to staring in grim resignation. They had allowed themselves a bubble of normalcy, a fleeting moment where they could relax and breathe and pretend everything was as it had always been.

That bubble had sprung a leak the moment the bus had arrived—it popped entirely when Sam paused in front of the driver to say, “We’ll be needing to get off at Blackwood Pines.” She smiled a tight-lipped wince over her shoulder to the others before making her way down the narrow aisle of the bus. She tossed her bag into a seat about two-thirds of the way back, predicting (correctly) that Chris and Ashley would take their own row. “So…” she started, making herself a comfortable little nest out of her jacket as she settled into her window seat. “I take it your mom’s a holiday baker then, Chris?”

“Huh? Oh. Pfft, hardly.” Letting Ashley wriggle into the row before him, Chris turning around to face Sam. “She’s more of a ‘day-ends-in-y’ baker.” He rolled his eyes. “An emotional baker, if you will. A bored baker. Some people clean when they’re stressed, some people smoke, some people jog—”

Directly in front of Sam, Ashley clucked her tongue. “Yes, please list _everything_ people do when stressed out. It’s like…super enlightening.”

“Well, if you hadn’t _interrupted_ me…anyway. Some people write angsty poetry, some—” Mid-sentence, Ashley reached over and zipped his jacket up the rest of the way, the collar obscuring the lower half of his face and muffling his words. Chris was undeterred, though, and continued listing things off, using his fingers to count all the different activities he mumbled through. He laughed before unzipping himself, “She bakes a lot, is the moral of the story. A _lot_.”

“I’m not complaining.” Ashley was already bent over double, digging around in Chris’s bag on the floor. When she sat back up, she had a second cookie at the ready. “Seriously, she could _sell_ her stuff.”

“Hey, do you _mind_ , Snoop-lock Holmes? Maybe I got private shit in there that I don’t want you poking around.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, are you worried I’m gonna get fingerprints on your _Yu-Gi-Oh_ cards?”

“Maybe I _am_.”

To Sam, it sounded like an old conversation—the sort played through hundreds of times in hundreds of slightly different ways, the sort she’d shared with Hannah. As far as she could tell, her smile didn’t flinch even as that hollow spot in her chest cramped up, but she knew it was time for her to phase into the background. She took her earphones out of her front zipper again, plugging them into her phone and popping the buds into her ears. Her finger was hovering over her screen when she realized she was being looked at, and she glanced back up to find Chris offering her the plate. “Oh—I’m good, thanks.”

“For real?” he asked, waving it back and forth in a tantalizing way. “It’s a long driiiiive…”

Ashley made a small sound of surprise as the bus lurched under them, beginning their trek up to the mountains. “ _Vegan_ ,” she annunciated the word very carefully, clearly teasing him. “Remember?”

His forehead wrinkled for a second. “Okay, _obviously_ there’s not meat in—oh. Eggs. Shit. Aw man, I’m sorry Sam.”

She laughed and pulled her sucker out of her mouth to brandish it. “It’s cool. _World’s Best Professor_ , remember? I’m all set.” Part of her wanted to go into the whole spiel she always had at the ready, the one meant to reassure everyone that no, it was totally cool that they forgot, not everyone understood what was or wasn’t vegan, blah-blah-blah…and found she didn’t have the energy for it. Not even a little. She’d been okay for a few minutes, there, and then she’d remembered _why_ they were all meeting up, and suddenly she was plunged back into the existential dread she’d been contending with since the night of the prank. Well…it had been fun while it lasted. Sam glanced back down at her phone, scrolled through her considerable collection of music, and then decided against it. Instead, she leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes, hoping that simply having her earbuds in would be enough of a social cue to keep Chris or Ashley from trying to engage her again until she’d managed to shake off the funk she was feeling.

The trip up to the mountains was a long one. In the good old days, it was the sort of ‘long’ jam-packed with Christmas morning excitement, everyone ready to see the sights, catch some skiing, maybe get cozy in front of one of the lodge’s gorgeous fireplaces. This, however, was not one of the good old days, and accordingly, every minute spent being jostled by the bus felt like twenty years spent in a dentist’s chair.

Tired as they were, none of them could even come close to napping. Sam remained curled up to herself, absently listening to the inconsequential small-talk going on in front of her. She could only understand so much of it, really, and that sent another pang of sadness aching through her gut; it was friend-language, made up of shared experience and inside jokes, referencing contexts she’d never be fully aware of. She’d had one of those too, once. Now it was as dead as Latin. Candy long-since melted away, she gnawed at the papery stick of her lollipop, trying desperately to find another train of thought.

If Sam had thought that things were _better_ in the row ahead of her, she was wrong. An uncomfortable silence had fallen between Chris and Ashley once they’d run out of stories about what so-and-so had done during study hall, or the mystery objects found in the dorm bathroom that week. The closer they got to the mountains, the steeper the incline of the road beneath them became, the more agitated the two seemed to grow. Apropos of nothing, Chris took a heavy breath. “I just…” he muttered, only barely loud enough that Ashley could hear him from over the rumbling of the bus’s motor. “I can’t shake this feeling that like…he doesn’t _want_ us there. Here. You know.” He dropped his head into his hands, pressing the pads of his fingers hard into his forehead as he thought.

Ashley _did_ know. It had been the only thing they’d been talking about for _days,_ leading up to the return trip. She leaned her temple against the window, her vision jittering with the bus’s vibrations while she mulled over her words. Broaching the topic of Josh was always a risky venture with Chris. The past few months, maybe even the past _year,_ if she was being entirely honest with herself, it seemed like there were increasingly fewer things she could say about Josh (or even _related_ to Josh) that wouldn’t make Chris exceedingly uncomfortable. Maybe that was what divorcing parents felt like when talking to their kids. She didn’t like _that_ particular line of thought. “It’ll probably be less awkward when everyone else comes on Saturday.”

He blew a derisive puff of breath through his teeth, shaking his head. “Yeah, I’m sure things will get _way_ better when they show. _If_ they show.” Straightening back up, he hunched himself down into his seat more comfortably. “Funerals are _always_ better when someone’s blasting Katy Perry’s entire discography from their phone on an endless loop.”

Managing a tired smile, she swiveled her head back from the window. “It’s not a _funeral_.”

“Not _officially._ ” But it was. It was and they all knew that, somewhere deep inside of themselves. Every day spent up at the lodge was a day spent in some degree of mourning. The forestry service had already announced that finding the girls was no longer a matter of _rescue,_ but of _recovery,_ and there was no denying what that meant. They’d be returning to the lodge to help search the grounds, sure, but _mostly_ they’d be doing everything in their power to keep Josh’s mind off of the royal clusterfuck enveloping his family. No rescue. Just recovery. “I wish they _weren’t_ coming, you know? It’s going to be hard enough with just _us_. I don’t get why they’re coming back at all—if I pulled something like that, I’d do my best to drop off the face of the planet for the next decade or so.”

Ashley rolled her eyes and looked up at him, expression positively dripping distaste. “Oh, I’m sure that _Emily’s_ doing it out of the goodness of her heart.” She paused, pulling her lower lip into her mouth for a moment. “That wasn’t fair,” she sighed, squeezing her eyes shut. “Ugh. That was…that was bitchy.”

“ _So_ bitchy.” The mockery in Chris’s tone was obvious, but when Ashley glared over at him, he stuck his tongue out at her for good measure. “Look, you’re preaching to the choir here. My professional opinion? _Fuck_ Emily, and _fuck_ Jessica. They’re the ones who _caused_ this. They’re the ones who _had_ to go and pick on Hannah, and now _we’re_ the ones getting saddled with the emotional fallout. So yeah, _fuck_ them.”

It was a conversation they’d had a few times before (usually in the dead of night when neither could sleep, squinting against the too-bright light of their phones as their fingers tapped away), but something about the repetition felt almost comforting. “Jess really isn’t _that_ bad, you know…” she muttered, branching off from their well-practiced dialogue. “She can be pretty nice—”

“Uh huh,” Chris interjected. “ _Real_ nice.”

She felt a slight spike of defensiveness despite knowing full well that, were the shoe on the other foot, chances were… _slim_ that Jessica would stick up for _her_. Ashley had already decided to let it go before she opened her mouth again, one corner of her lips tightening ever so slightly as she added, “She’s at least the lesser of two evils.”

“ _Evil!_ ” The clap was muted by Chris’s gloves, but Ashley jumped all the same. “ _That’s_ the word I was looking for: Evil. They’re evil. Thank you, Ash.” It was a joke, of course, but only _just._ In high school, Emily and Jessica had been in different years than him—had been in different _circles_ than him, more importantly—yet there was no escaping social osmosis. He had known all he’d needed to know about them _before_ the prank, and now? Yeah, they hadn’t precisely proven him _wrong._ Chris turned back to Ashley just in time to watch as, without warning, her eyes widened to the size of dessert plates. “What?” he asked, and then, for no real reason he could place, he lowered his voice and tried again. “ _What?_ ”

Moving as casually as she was able, Ashley turned to steal a peek through the gap between their chairs to the row behind them, where Sam was sitting. Thankfully, she was just staring intently out the window towards the mountain, her earbuds in. Ashley shot Chris a brief, relieved look, gesturing to Sam with only her eyes before righting herself in her seat. “I keep forgetting,” she said, voice only just above a whisper. “She’s like… _friends_ with Emily. Right?”

Once the dread of realization passed, Chris’s lip curled. “I don’t get how _anyone_ could be friends with Emily, but…”

She sighed quietly, nudging his arm with her elbow. “People say the same thing about _you_.”

“No they don’t.”

“They do,” she stated matter-of-factly, plucking one of the cookies from the plate balanced on the top of his bag. “All the time, actually.”

“Pfft. Yeah. Sure. Okay.” He took a cookie as well, gesturing with it like a professor with a laser pointer. “The fact remains, though. Emily Davis does not have _friends._ She has _accessories_.” Taking a dramatic bite out of his cookie, Chris shrugged. “Man, how Mike puts up with her, I don’t even know.”

In response, Ashley simply made a low sound of disgust. She let her eyes move back to the scenery zipping past the bus in an attempt to hide her scowl.

It didn’t work (with Chris, it very rarely _did_ ), and he spread his arms as wide as the aisle would let him. “Oh come _on_ , what did Mike ever do to you? He’s…” he struggled for a moment, “…okay. He’s okay. Maybe kind of—”

“Full of himself?” she offered, “Arrogant? Self-obsessed? He thinks he’s God’s gift to women, and let me tell you, if that’s the case, I’d really appreciate a gift receipt.”

“Wow. Just…wow.”

She sank lower into her seat, setting her cheek against one of her shoulders. “He _knew_ how much Hannah liked him, Chris. He _knew_. And he _knew_ what the others wanted to do, and he _knew_ how mean it was, and he did it anyway.” Her brow creased bitterly, and she couldn’t help the shiver of discomfort that danced its way up her spine and down the backs of her arms. Absently, she reached up to rub at them, hoping she just looked cold to him. “Can you _imagine_ knowing there was someone who thought the _world_ of you, and then you just…turn around and betray them like that?”

The shudder, it seemed, was contagious. Chris readjusted himself awkwardly in his seat, pointedly looking straight ahead towards the front of the bus, lest he risk catching her eye. “No,” he said quietly, after a time. “I can’t.”

Ashley tugged her hood up, if only to give her hands something to do. “At least Matt’s not too bad.”

“Ugh.”

“What? Matt’s a sweetie.”

“Yeah, he’s _real_ sweet. I’m sure Hannah thinks so too.”

She cast her eyes down to the ground and folded her hands in her lap, tangling and untangling her fingers in anxious knots. “You know, _I_ was part of it too,” she muttered. “I was there, same as them.”

“It’s _not_ the same. Don’t lump yourself in with them. That was _completely_ different, Ash.”

For a long moment, she just kept staring down at her hands. She blinked slowly before speaking again. “ _How?_ ”

Chris clapped his hands together again, “Okay, know what I just realized we need to talk about? Literally _anything other than this_.”

Though she’d missed some of it due to the muting of her earbuds, Sam had heard enough to bristle. Not that she _blamed_ them. She didn’t _approve_ , either, of course, but it would’ve been a lie to say she hadn’t entertained a fair number of similar thoughts, of late. Every time she saw a phone notification or a post on her feed, or _anything_ relating to _any_ of the Blackwood gang, it had been accompanied by a churning in her stomach. The rational part of her brain knew that what had happened had just been an unfortunate series of events leading to a horrible accident…

But unfortunately for everyone involved, the rational part of her brain wasn’t really behind the steering wheel anymore. Now it was the emotional part holding the reins, laying blame on everyone between episodes of flogging itself with regrets. That _included_ Chris and Ashley. And, though she was loathe to admit it, maybe Josh, too. Definitely _herself_. Her best friends were dead, and there was more than enough blame to go around. She knew it wasn’t fair. She knew it wasn’t _right_. Everyone was hurting, everyone felt bad, there were no _winners_ in this situation.

Yet she kept finding herself hearing snatches of these conversations, kept getting saddled with the preposterous feelings that she was standing on the sidelines and waiting to see whether she’d get pulled onto the team or not. It was a sad reminder that she was the outsider, now. She might’ve been on the bus with them, and she might’ve had a new group text with them, but Josh and Chris and Ashley? They weren’t _her_ unit, not _her_ inner circle— _her_ inner circle was likely stuck in some mountain crevice, skin black with frostbite, buried under a foot of unforgiving snow.

Nope.

No.

Those were not helpful thoughts.

She blinked hard, trying to wipe her traitorous mind of the awful images it had just conjured up, finding it harder than expected. Swiping her phone screen, she pulled up the local news radio’s stream. _Radio From the Pines_. It had more or less been the backing track of her life for the past two weeks; it had replaced her usual shower playlist, workout playlist, and (God knew her grades on her most recent exams showed it) study playlist. For Sam, it was the aural equivalent of passing by a car wreck: She didn’t want to listen to it, didn’t want to know whether they’d found any remains, but at the same time, she found she couldn’t bear _not_ to listen. She tried to focus on the more trivial aspects of the program. It was, for example, surreal to hear the Washingtons’ names interspersed with reports on bear sightings and weather forecasts, stranger still to know that she was one of the people the broadcasters were talking about whenever they reminded their listeners that ‘ _the girls were last seen by a group of their friends outside the Blackwood Pines lodge._ ’ She’d recently gotten to the point where she could recognize each broadcaster by voice—a neat little shortcut her brain was able to take whenever she opened the stream in the middle of a report, but ultimately useless.

Sam upped the volume until the last of Chris and Ashley’s conversation was lost to her. Taken in by the rhythmic jostling of the bus and the droning voices of the reporters, she thought she had started to doze. Really, she _had_ to have, because it seemed very much as though they reached their stop only minutes later. **  
**

The three of them slowly made their way down the bus’s aisle, doing their best to keep their bulky bags from smacking into one another. Stepping out into the snowy wind was at once bracing and horrible. It woke them all up from the uncomfortable fugue of the long trip, sure, but it felt very much like a slap in the face—a reminder meant to bring them back to Earth and drive home what their purpose was.

They stood just outside the Blackwood property as the bus rumbled away, filling the air with an acrid belch of exhaust. There was a long minute where none of them spoke or moved or did much of anything besides breathe. As though in the grips of some strange folie à deux (or folie à _trois_ , as it were), the three found themselves each weighted down by a leaden ball of dread, making it seem as though the mountain itself had sprung to life and had begun slowly eating them from the boots up. The icy air felt suffocating in their lungs, cutting their throats like glass; the promise of sunset felt more like the threat of an unknown beast preparing to plunge them into the Halloweenish terror of full dark.

It was so strange—so _terrible_ —how very quickly things had changed. When they had stood in that very spot two weeks ago, they had been thrumming with excited anticipation. And now?

Now they all shared an expression that suggested they were trying their best not to puke.

“Are you…gonna be okay?”

Sam all but literally jumped out of her own skin when she felt the light pressure of Chris’s hand on her shoulder. With an embarrassed grimace, she glanced from him to Ashley, struck by the eerie similarity of their expressions. After a beat, it clicked, and she swallowed down the uncomfortable suspicion that they’d probably been privately discussing this (and _her_ ) at length, over the past few days, just as they’d _clearly_ been discussing the others. “Yeah…yeah, I’m good.” Her tongue felt numb as she said it, though, like she’d just gotten out of a particularly rigorous dentist appointment. Sam looked back up to Chris, and then to Ashley, attempting a more natural smile. “ _Really_ , guys. I’m fine.”

The silence that fell between them again suggested _very_ heavily that neither quite believed her. She wondered for a moment if she even believed herself.

“You know, the sooner we get up there, the sooner we can get warm, so…maybe we should do that, huh?” Taking the lead as always, Sam crossed the threshold from the street onto the path leading to the cable car.

Ashley and Chris hung back for a second, watching her crunch her way through the thick snow. Looking up to him, Ashley blew a puff of breath that ruffled her hair from out of her face. Chris shrugged uncertainly in response before nodding in Sam’s direction. Wordlessly, they followed, beginning the familiar path up to the lodge.

***

**10:43pm**

Tense.

That was the only word that came close to describing the uncomfortable atmosphere of the lodge. When they’d arrived, there’d been a fair amount of tiptoeing around the sorest spots. Saying hello to Mrs. Washington had been difficult, avoiding the constant in-and-out of rangers and law enforcement had been a task in and of itself, but mostly everyone (Josh _especially_ ) seemed intent on pretending that their last visit, and more specifically their last conversation out on the mountain, had never happened.

As if the lodge were suddenly a haunted house, there was a shared realization that none of them wanted to be in certain areas. No one, for example, wanted to spend any prolonged period of time sitting around the kitchen island. The guest room was strictly off-limits. Even the _cinema_ lost its luster. Everything just felt _off_.

Some of that discomfort had melted away as they warmed up and got more comfortable, leaving their coats to drip off thin layers of snow on the entrance mat. Eating a full meal had improved their moods as well, but no one would go so far as to say things were _good_. Better, maybe. Not _good_.

The girls—and oh, it was weird to realize that Ashley and Sam were ‘ _the girls’_ , now, when _‘the girls’_ had always been the twins, before—had gone upstairs to situate their things, leaving Josh and Chris alone for the time being. A small fire was crackling away in the grate situated in the middle of the sitting room just off the kitchen, giving the area a deceptively cozy feel. From where he lay half-sprawled on the couch, Josh reached out and let his cellphone clatter onto the coffee table. “Down for a game while the ladies powder their noses, Cochise?”

Chris glanced up from his own phone before shrugging, setting it down on the table on top of Josh’s. “If you’re ready to lose.” He said it with a smirk, but internally, he couldn’t shake the idea that he had just stepped onto a minefield and heard a _click_. This was dangerous territory, he thought. “Uh, before that, though…”

There was a sigh from Josh. “Mhm. I figured. Go on. Get it over with.”

“Don’t…don’t _do_ that, okay? I just want to make sure you’re—”

“I’m _fine_. See? Totally fine. Five by five.” Josh gestured to himself with a curt wave.

His shoulders sagged. Before he could will himself out of it, Chris got up from the floor, pushing Josh’s legs out of the way so that he could sit on the other end of the couch. “I’m being serious.”

“Oh, and I’m not?”

Anxiously, his eyes flicked overhead, in the general vicinity of the staircase’s landing. There were no telltale signs of the girls coming back down yet, so he probably a good minute or two. “Uh, no. No one _should_ be okay with all this going on. Especially not—” That time, he cut _himself_ off, watching as Josh leveled his gaze at him and cocked his head to the side expectantly. “I just mean,” Chris tried again, “That this is…a _really shitty situation_. And no one’s _expecting_ you to be okay if you’re not.”

“But I am.”

“Dude. Come on.”

And just like that, they were at an impasse. Chris dropped his hands onto his lap with a drawn-out sigh. Josh kept watching him, lips pursed to one side as he waited for the next salvo of reassurances.

“Look.” When Josh spoke up again, his tone wasn’t half as firm as he’d intended for it to be. “I get it, Cochise, really and for truly my dude, I do. And I thank you for the concern, but for real? Let it go. Just like the song says, yeah? Let it go, let it go…” he spread his hands out in front of him, fluttering them like bird wings as he half-sung the words. “If I _wanted_ to talk about it, I’d talk about it.” He raised his eyebrows, making pointed eye contact with Chris. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Capisce?”

“Capase.”

Josh brushed his hands together twice as if to say ‘ _that’s that!_ ’ and gestured back to the table. “Great! Now that we’ve got that Dr. Phil shit out of the way—you going first or am I?”

He attempted a smile in return, doing his best to ignore the apprehensive tightening in his throat. Josh was not one to talk about his emotions, that much he knew, but that last conversation on the cliff still stung like a fresh paper cut. Already, Chris felt himself dreading a potential reprise. “Eh, you go ahead. It’ll give me more time to think of mine."

“A foolish first move, man. I’ve already got the home field advantage.”

“That sounds _way_ too close to sports-talk to be coming from either of _you_.” Sam poked her head around the corner first, leaning against the wall while giving them a brief once-over. “Now, maybe I’m behind on the times, but I’m not really familiar with any sports that take place on a couch.”

As if he’d been expecting her, Josh waved her over. “No sports here. The great American pastime? Sure! The game of games. The game of kings!”

Ashley appeared next to Sam, folding her arms across her chest. “The great American pastime is _baseball_.”

“Details, details.”

“And I’m _fairly_ sure the game of kings is golf.”

“Hey, Encyclopedia Brown, literally no one asked you.” Josh turned his gaze back to Sam, “Come on and pull up a seat, ladies. Or, _lady and Ash_ , at least.” Using one of his feet, he pulled one of the nearby chairs closer to the couch, patting the cushion absently with one hand. “Always room for more. In fact…” he shot a quick, worrying smirk Chris’s way, “…the more the merrier.”

The girls exchanged a quick look before Ashley shrugged and dropped herself down on the couch between the two of them, leaning herself over the table expectantly. “Sure, why not. Beats flipping through all the cooking channels.” She drummed her fingers absently as she waited for one of them to explain. “Sooooo…” she drawled, playfully nudging her shoulder against Chris’s, “What’re we playing, team?”

Chris waved to the coffee table as a game show hostess might’ve, raising an eyebrow in an obvious mockery of suaveness. “What do you _think_ we’re playing?”

“My first guess, knowing you two, was Seven Minutes in Heaven, but…I’m not seeing any closets around so…I’m beginning to have my doubts,” Sam joked, taking the open seat to Josh’s side.

Josh gasped theatrically, rearing back in feigned disappointment. “Aw _shit_ —I didn’t even think of that. Hey, any chance we can scrap this and try Sammy’s idea instead?”

“Overruled,” came Ashley’s curt reply.

“Fuck. Fuckity fuck. Now I don’t think I even _want_ to play,” Chris sighed. He pouted dramatically for a moment longer before laughing, “Social Suicide. C’mon, you know the rules. Uh, well, Ash does, anyway. Phones in the center of the table.”

Before he’d had a chance to finish his sentence, Ashley’s expression had morphed into something notably less chipper. Her eyes dropped to the table for only the briefest of instants, noticing that Chris’s and Josh’s phones were already laid out. Her arms were folded the next second, her lips pressed tightly together in what might’ve been contemplation, but could have very well been insult instead. The ball of her foot bounced against the floor as she tried to decide whether she was going to stay in her seat or bail entirely. “Hmm. Actually…I think I’m going to go take a shower.”

Sam and Chris looked up, almost in unison. Josh did not. He looked back down to his own phone, lying impotently atop the table, next to his half-finished soda. There were a million things he could’ve said in that moment (not that they would occur to him until hours later, as he stared at his ceiling while trying to fall asleep), but all he did was suck in a quiet breath through his teeth.

She had meant to leave in a slow, dignified sort of way. What _actually_ happened was that Ashley sprang up as though she’d been stabbed, making her egress towards the bathroom quickly enough to suggest she was being chased. “More tired than I thought, I guess. You guys have fun,” she said simply, waving a hand dismissively in their direction.

“You o…kay?” Chris had begun to ask, but Ashley was long gone by the time he managed to finish the thought. “Uh…huh.” His mouth tightened as a worried crease appeared between his eyebrows.

Equal parts intrigued and uncomfortable, Sam leaned her arms against the table, leaning in towards the center. “Mk, I’ll bite…” she said with a laugh, hoping it covered up some of the awkwardness Ashley had left in her wake. “What’s Social Suicide?”

“Well, why don’t you put your phone on the table so you can find out?”

She eyed them warily, eyes moving from Josh to Chris before she obliged. From the pocket of her hoodie, she produced her cellphone, brandishing it in their direction before setting it down next to theirs. “Okay…now what?”

“Social Suicide,” Josh interrupted, swiveling in his seat just far enough to be able to extend his arms out to his sides in a grandiose sweeping motion without smacking either of them. “Is the _premier_ in what the kids these days are calling ‘info-tainment.’ One part challenge, one part psychological intrigue, three parts trust exercise. Buckle in, little lady. We’ll show you how it’s done.”

“Uh…” she shot a quick glance over her shoulder to where Ashley had disappeared off to. Clearly she knew something Sam did not. “So _what_ is it?”

“It’s a quality bonding exercise.” Josh let his arms drop back down to the table, his earlier grin resurfacing. “You learn while you play! What’s not to love?”

Seeing she had hit a wall, she looked to Chris plaintively. “What am I getting into, here?”

“It’s truth or dare.” He laughed even as Josh groaned, shrugging his shoulders helplessly. “There’s no use _lying_ to her, bro."

Turning back to Sam, Josh shook his head in a manner that seemed almost confidential. “Don’t listen to Ol’ Four-Eyes, there. Social Suicide is _not_ truth or dare.”

From the other side of the couch, there was a low hum of uncertainty. “I mean…it’s…” Chris clucked his tongue, “It’s pretty much truth or dare.”

“Okay, fine, whatever, it’s truth or dare, but it’s _better_.” The concession was accompanied by a frustrated eye-roll. “None of you fuckers have any flair for the dramatic, I swear to Christ…okay, here’s what it is. In Social Suicide, you go around the table, one by one, and ask one person—of _your_ choice—a question.”

“ _Or_ you ask them to do something. Usually something embarrassing.” Chris rested his hand against his cheek as he looked up at Sam from over the frames of his glasses, “Or at the very least, really, _really_ stupid.”  
  
Without missing a beat, Josh continued, “Any time someone wusses out, then the asker gets to do whatever they want with the chicken’s phone.” He picked his own phone up from the table for emphasis, swiping the lock screen before waggling it in her direction. “ _Anything_. Send out a text, send an email, fuck with any social media they were stupid enough to be logged into, delete all their contact names…any shit you can come up with. If you’re an uncreative dunce like Ash, you can turn the screen brightness up to max and call it a day. _Or_ …and this is where it gets _good_ , so stick with me here… _or_ …you can just _pretend_ you did some shit on their phone, hand it back to them, and let them shit themselves for a week trying to figure out what you changed.” Flicking his phone back onto the table, he spread his hands out in welcome, “So whaddya say, Miss Giddings? Up to the challenge?”

_Oh fuck_. Chris bit back a grimace as he was slapped upside the head with an unfortunate realization. He knew why Ashley had run off. The memory of the three of them clustered together in the kitchen came back to him, unbidden, as he fixed his gaze on the fire popping and crackling across from them. Josh demanding Ashley’s phone. Ashley slamming it into Josh’s hand. Josh poking through _everything_ to make sure she hadn’t recorded the prank. _Fuck_.

“I…don’t think I trust either of you with my phone,” Sam said, pausing to examine them carefully.

“That’s the _point_ , duh.” Chris chuckled stiffly and leaned back in his seat. He did his best to keep the grief from his face, making a mental note to pull Ashley aside and apologize later. “You think _I_ trust _anyone_ with mine? Much less _that_ one?” He waved in Josh’s direction, and to his credit, Josh had the decency to flash his best and toothiest grin, refraining from feigning ignorance. “Yeah, no."

“I thought we were _friends_ , Cochise.”

“Friends or not, man, you’re a fucking sadist sometimes.” Some part of him was angry at how jokingly it had come out. Some other part was sad that he had wanted it to be accusatory at all. In that moment, Chris regretted agreeing to play in the first place.

Josh, unaware of the internal struggle raging next to him, pretended to bow. “ _I_ like to think of it as just…being a little more _creative_ than most.”

“Uh huh. _‘Creative.’_ Okay.”

Sam couldn’t help but laugh, shaking her head. Well, she was in for it—no going back now. “If you mess with each other so bad, then why do you _do_ it?”

“Like I said—bonding,” Josh chuckled.

“More like _blackmail_ ,” Chris mumbled. Forcing another smile, he reached over and knocked his knuckles against Josh’s.

“Oookay…I’ll just ask that you gents take it easy on me since I’m new here.” She grimaced when they both turned to look at her, beaming innocently. It had been a long shot. “Or don’t. Whatever, see if I care. So. Who’s going first?”

Chris pointed to Josh, who immediately shook his head. “Nu-uh, Sammy’s the initiate. Howsabout _you_ go? Just dive in headfirst.”

“Oh no. No way. I’m not about to put myself at you guys’ mercy like that. I’ll go second.”

“God, you just painted such a big target on your head.” Shaking his head, Chris nestled himself deeper into the couch cushions. “You heard the lady, _el presidente_. Take it away.”

Josh, clearly in his element, cleared his throat and cracked his knuckles out. He pretended to appraise the both of them before setting his sights on Sam, nodding to himself. “All righty then…if you insist. If you would, Sammy, please share with the class the _worst_ person you’ve ever had a sex dream about.”

She watched him for a long moment before slowly blinking. “What if I’ve never _had_ a sex dream about anyone, _Josh?_ ”

“Ah ah ah, I’m sorry Sammy, that kind of deflection is strictly not allowed. Now please, share.”

A sliver of her tongue poked out and wet her lower lip as she thought, still watching him with equal parts amusement and resignation. “Okay. Okay, I think I’m getting it now. It’s a lose-lose game. _Either_ I embarrass _myself_ in front of you guys, or _you_ embarrass me by like…sexting my dad.”

“Still deflecting. Interesting…interesting…”

“Sam,” Chris said, holding a hand out to her in a show of compassion, “I need to make you a solemn promise right now that I will _never_ sext your dad. Your _grand_ dad, maybe. _Absolutely_ any of your aunts. Not your dad, though. That’s messed up.”

Sam let out a groan that tapered into a laugh. Throwing her arms into the air, she sighed in defeat. “Oh _God_ …” She shook her head before rolling her eyes to the ceiling in an attempt to keep from watching their expressions as she dug her own grave. “Skrillex.”

The room fell deathly silent. Over on the couch, time seemed to have stopped entirely—it was the proverbial record-screech moment where everything stopped and everyone just turned to stare.

“Hang on. Hang on. Hang… _Skrillex_.” Josh had gone strangely rigid, gaze fixed somewhere in the middle-distance. For all intents and purposes, he looked very much like someone trying to decipher an unexpectedly difficult math equation. “ _Skrillex_.”

“ _D-d-d-d-d-drop_ _your pants_ ,” Chris added helpfully, before devolving into what Sam could _only_ assume was his attempt at replicating dubstep noises. It was a lot of ‘bwa’s and a lot of ‘untz’s, and quite frankly, didn’t do much to improve the situation.

“You asked!” She laughed, covering her face and laughing. “I’m not saying it was a _good_ dream, I was just answering your question!”

“No, no, wait. Just…just wait a second. Rewind. Let’s roll the tapes back here. Is this…Sammy.”

She shook her head almost frantically, lungs starting to ache from laughing. “No! No follow-up questions. No one said _anything_ about follow-up questions! I answered, so your turn is done.”

Josh sighed but let it drop, elbowing Chris when he wouldn’t stop his shitty beatboxing. “Upsetting. So upsetting, Sammy. Thank you for your contribution.” He picked up a soda from the table, winking at her from over its rim. “Your turn, pilgrim. Take a spin, and we’ll tell ya if you’re doing it wrong.”

“How encouraging. Okay…well…” Sam thought it over, tapping her fingers rhythmically against her chin. She looked between the two of them, dramatically narrowing her eyes before it came to her. “Chris…”

“Yeees?” He set his chin against his fists, offering her a cheesy smile.

“So…I get to ask a question _or_ order you to do something, right?”

“That’s the gist of it, yeah. Thought we already covered that. Good to see that today’s youth are such good listeners. You know, back in _my_ day—”

Sam leaned in closer to the coffee table, fixing Chris with a flat stare. “Then I choose question.”

“I choose to wonder why you phrased it like that, but okay I guess.”

Narrowing her eyes, Sam mulled over her question for only a second. “Why aren’t you and Ashley like…dating?”

There was a choked sound to her side as Josh literally spat his soda out, slamming his palms against the table before taking a deep gulp of air. “ _You got the hang of this game so fast!!_ ” he wheezed, voice still strained and strange from swallowing the wrong way. “ _I am so proud of you!_ ” He turned and coughed a few times to clear his throat out, but it was obvious from the reddening of his face that he was _mostly_ just laughing.

Across the couch, Chris’s face was turning red too—for markedly different reasons. “Can you…I… _Jesus Christ!_ Will you guys shut the fuck _up?_ She’s just in the next room, holy—shut _up!_ Oh my God.” He craned his head to try and see around to the hall, all to no avail. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember if she’d said she was using the bathroom on _this_ floor, or the _third_ floor. “Oh my _God_ ,” he repeated, much quieter the second time around.

Gathering his composure, Josh reached over to squeeze Sam in an appreciative side-hug. “Oh, stuff it. She can’t hear a fucking thing with the water running. Stop being a baby and answer.”

“ _Or_ you could give me your phone…” Sam beamed, trying her best to _not_ laugh outright at Chris’s discomfort.

He turned back to them both, bright roses of humiliation burning in the centers of his cheeks. “It’s not _funny!_ Why are you guys _laughing_ like that?”

“I mean…it’s…kind of funny?” Sam raised her hands in defense, “In a cute way! In a cute way. Like I said before!”

Josh shoved her hands back down. “Nonono, oh no. You either answer the question or you forfeit your phone, man, you know the rules. _Sammy_ did it! And hers was bad, dude. I mean…I’m sorry Sam, but I am absolutely never going to let you live _that_ shit down.”

“Come _on!_ ”

“Do you want _me_ to answer her?” Josh asked, leaning in closer to Chris. “Because I’ll tell ya, man, I am _ready_ and _willing_ to answer this question for you. It’s not _strictly_ against the rules, but…still probably a dick move, huh?” He quirked an eyebrow in Sam’s direction before snickering again. “Man, I didn’t think this was going to be so _fun_. Fuck, we should’ve invited you to play with us _ages_ ago…”

Sam shot Chris another apologetic, but no less entertained grin. “I mean…it…it _is_ Valentine’s Day.”

Josh’s eyes widened until they seemed to take up half of his face. “Ho. Ly. Shit.” He turned back to Chris quickly enough to give himself whiplash. “It _is_ Valentine’s Day. It’s the perfect time, Cochise. The stage has been _set_ , the stars are in _alignment_ , and now’s the _time!_ ”

Chris glowered as he looked between the two of them. “This is bullshit and you guys are _ass_ holes.”

“Oh my _God_ , stop being such a baby. She went _way_ easier on you than _I_ would’ve.” Josh leaned forward, still staring at Chris as he let his fingers creep their way towards the phones on the table. “Is that a forfeiture, my good man?”

Sam waved her hands again. “Forget it! I’ll ask something else, it’s no big deal.”

“Ah, ah, ah…no do-overs.”

She rolled her eyes over to Josh, “I’m starting to think you might just be making up the rules as you go along.”

“Ugh. Just.” Heaving a beleaguered sigh through his nose, Chris folded his arms and looked back into the fireplace, making a deliberate point to avoid making eye contact with either of them. For all of thirty seconds, it really did appear as though he was thinking it over…and then he reached into the middle of the coffee table, picked up his phone, and tossed it to Sam. “Go nuts.”

Josh’s disappointment was immediately apparent, “Aw come on!”

It had been _too_ easy of a choice, really: Chris doubted wholly that Sam would do anything nefarious with his phone (honestly, he doubted she was capable of doing much of _anything_ mean-spirited, even on her worst days), and God knew with his luck being what it was, Ashley would’ve walked in halfway through any explanation he could’ve given. “Nah, it’s cool, it’s cool. Go on, keep makin’ fun of me. I can take it. Just remember it’s _my_ turn next,” he warned Josh, quirking an eyebrow menacingly.

“I’m trembling, man. Really, I am.”

Sam stared at Chris’s home screen uncertainly as she tried to decide what to do. This was very much _not_ the sort of game she was used to playing. “Uh…hmm…” she furrowed her brow and flipped through his phone settings. “Am I allowed to ask for help coming up with ideas, here?”

“Absolutely _not_ —” Chris began, just as Josh cut him off.

“Hey Sammy. I’m not like. Here to give you _ideas_ or anything. But maybe you should…I don’t know, open his photo roll.”

Chris was confused for all of half a second, and then he realized _exactly_ what Josh was angling at. “Shut up,” he said, trying to cover Josh’s mouth with his hand. “Shut your face! Don’t you _tell_ her about that—”

Fighting him off valiantly, Josh wriggled as far out of Chris’s reach as he could, speaking very quickly to Sam. “Open the photos open the photos open the photos and _scroll_ until you find the _Twilight_ picture.”

“ _Josh!_ ” There was a grunt as Chris yanked him back down off the arm off the couch. “You’re such a _jackass!_ ”

Sam watched them tussle, even as she absently flicked through his photo rolls. “Yeah, no, I’m…I’m gonna need to know what the _Twilight_ picture is, actually.”

“God, I _hate_ you guys.”

***

**Saturday, February 15, 2014  
1:24am**

Josh woke up suddenly, ripped out of his deep sleep by the singular sensation that he was being choked. He inhaled sharply through his nose, startling very badly when he saw the pale shape on his chest. It stood out against the grainy grey-green of the room’s darkness, white and spindly and—

He made no effort to resist groaning out loud. Josh let his eyes fall closed again (half in relief, half in exhaustion) before he grabbed Chris’s wrist, thoughtlessly flopping his arm back over to _his_ side of the bed. He heard the muted _thwump_ of contact, but Chris’s only response was a disgruntled snore and the rustle of sheets as he readjusted himself. Figured.

Raking his fingers through his hair, Josh was forced to confront the fact that he was _awake_ , now, for realzies, no fooling. With the uncoordinated movements of the recently awoken, he grabbed his phone from the bedside table, tapping the home button and wincing against the light of his lock screen. He hadn’t been out for long, that much was sure, but _clearly_ it had been more than enough time for everyone _else_ to sink into REM-Land. Some small part of him was almost thankful that he had been woken up before he had the opportunity to start dreaming. Lately, they hadn’t been…the best. In the handful of phone and text conversations they’d had in the past couple weeks, Hill had offered him a _wide_ variety of explanations for that—most of them began with “Well, Josh, why do _you_ think you’re having nightmares?” and ended with something along the lines of “We’ll talk more about this at your next appointment.”

Fat lot of good that was. The sheer _absurdity_ of thinking he would leave the lodge, leave the _search_ , to go sit in Hill’s stuffy office and waste his time answering hypotheticals or identifying new-age Rorschach squiggles was enough to make his stomach churn. They were going to have to _drag_ him from Blackwood Pines kicking and screaming, and if Hill wasn’t able to deal with the long-distance, then…

He set his phone down on his chest and took to scrubbing his face with his hands again, releasing a long, slow, pent-up breath. It was the middle of the night, and there was no use in getting worked up over that. Not again. Not when there wasn’t anything he could _do_ about it.

The carpet of his room was coarse under his bare feet as he rolled out of bed, ignoring the resulting mumble from the Chris-shaped lump that seemed to _immediately_ absorb both shares of the blankets. He did his best to remain at least somewhat soft-stepped until he left the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

There was something undeniably spooky about the lodge in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep. All old houses were like that, Josh figured, moaning and groaning like the elderly and invalid as their bones settled. But there was something _particularly_ unsettling about the lodge when it grew quiet. Blackwood was a place meant for voices and laughter, made up of rooms built to be entertained in, hallways designed to allow for people to mill about. When the voices and bodies disappeared, it had the same effect as a forest clearing going silent. It felt eerie. It felt _wrong_.

Of course, he’d been fighting against the dawning possibility that the lodge would just… _always_ feel wrong to him, now. It was slowly becoming less of a vacation home and more a vacant grave.

Just as he made up his mind to make the long journey down to the kitchen to get something to drink, Josh heard something clatter to the ground in the room next-door. His head snapped in the direction of the sound while he stood wide-eyed and suspicious in the darkened hallway. As though he’d misheard it, he narrowed his eyes, straining to hear anything else. He remained there in the hall for the better part of a minute, listening to the blood rushing in his ears. It was pointless—there was zero doubt that he was going to go investigate—but there was no ignoring the disquieting spike of adrenaline filling his throat with the sour taste of fear.

The noise had come from Beth’s bedroom.

_Of course_ it had.

It felt to him like each of his footsteps was heavy enough to rattle the framed pictures on the walls, loud enough to wake the entire property, but as he peeked into Beth’s room, the door left slightly ajar, it was obvious at once that he hadn’t been noticed at all. His chest seized up with a terrible moment of fear before he recognized the shadowy silhouette in front of Beth’s bed. Josh cleared his throat softly as he pushed the door open the rest of the way, leaning himself against the jamb. “Um…?”

There was a surprised gasp as Sam sprung up from where she’d squatted down to pick up the fallen picture frame; she hugged it tightly (and unintentionally) to her chest as she spun around, shoulders slumping with relief when she spotted Josh. She made a choked sound caught somewhere between a sigh and a grumble, waving the frame guiltily. “Yeah…busted, huh? Shit, I’m…I’m sorry, I didn’t want…I didn’t mean to wake anyone up.”

There were no lights on in the room, save for the bright rectangle of Sam’s phone lying face-up on Beth’s dresser, but even without being able to clearly see her face, it was at once obvious to Josh that something was up. He tried to recall a time he’d ever heard that tight, strained quality in her voice and came up empty-handed. “You didn’t,” he said in what he hoped was a reassuring manner, joining her in the room, closing the door most of the way for good measure. Sam didn’t reply, so he took the opportunity to wander over to the window, adjusting the blinds to let in a little more of the silvery winter light.

Sam glanced down at the picture in her hands, rubbing a thumb against the butterfly-shaped engraving before setting it back on the dresser she’d accidentally knocked it off of. She thought she could feel Josh watching her, but when she glanced over her shoulder, found him staring intently through the slats of the blinds. “So…if I didn’t wake you up, what did?” she asked, swiping both of her cheeks with her hands in a lightning-quick attempt to hide the evidence of any tear-tracks.

His shoulders rose and fell in a jerky shrug. “Oh, you know, Cochise was gettin’ a little handsy,” he said lightly, turning back to face her. “Can you blame the guy?” He tried to smirk, but realized he didn’t much feel like it, after all. Another quick shrug, and he was immensely grateful for the accommodating half-smile Sam offered. “How about you?” Josh asked, raising an eyebrow as he nodded towards her. “Was it Ash’s requisite nightlight? I keep telling that girl, she’s gotta get over the dark thing one of these days.”

She shook her head, “Nah, that’s not…no. I couldn’t sleep at all.” Her lips tightened against throb of fatigue behind her eyes. It was almost as though _saying_ it had made it truer, somehow—more _real_. Sam blinked a few times to try and lessen the burn, all to no avail.

“Hmm…did you try counting sheep?”

“I think I was at about…seven hundred and fifty two when I gave up.”

“What about that thing where you press your tongue to the roof of your mouth and breathe weird?”

“I never remember if I’m supposed to hold my breath for four seconds or seven. It gets very confusing.”

Josh nodded while she spoke. “So you thought you’d take a spooky little nighttime tour instead.” It wasn’t a question, not quite—he thought he likely knew the gist of why he’d found her in there, but left room enough for her to fill in the blanks for him.

“Sort of. I mean…I don’t know.” Sam suddenly felt very, very ridiculous, standing there in the middle of Beth’s bedroom in her candy cane print pajamas and cabin socks. In one fell swoop, she was just a little kid trespassing in a house that didn’t belong to her, snooping through other people’s things. She thought she’d gotten her tears out already, thought she’d lodged herself firmly in Denial Land’s comforting embrace, but another wave seemed close on their heels, her nose prickling warningly. “I just, uh…” she felt her voice catch and quickly cleared her throat to try and cover it up. “I just really…wanted to be in one of their rooms.” It sounded so much stupider, so much more childish than it had sounded in her own head. She couldn’t help but cough out a nervous laugh at the surreal nature of it all. “And I, um…I couldn’t…” she swallowed hard, realizing there was no way to hide the strain in her voice anymore. She turned away from the picture on the dresser and looked up at Josh, trying not to be ashamed of the hot tears welling in her eyes. “I couldn’t go into Hannah’s room,” she admitted, giving him a watery smile, “I couldn’t even…I couldn’t even open the door, you know?” Another tight laugh, and she sat down on the very edge of Beth’s bed, letting her legs go weak. “It was just too much. Too, too much.”

An unexpected pang of empathy zinged its way along each of Josh’s ribs. He found himself dropping his gaze to the floor, watching Sam drop her face into her hands in his periphery. Of all the things he thought he’d be doing tonight, this…suffice it to say, this hadn’t been very high on the list. He sucked his upper lip into his mouth, worrying it incessantly between his front teeth until he tasted copper. When he finally found his voice again, he was disappointed with how very unprepared he was for the conversation. It wasn’t _like_ him to not have a snappy one-liner at the ready, but as he slid his hands into the pockets of his pajama pants, he found the best he could manage was a dry, “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

Sam took a tired, shuddery breath through the spaces of her fingers, sniffling just loudly enough to make it impossible to hide the fact she was crying. She opened her mouth to say something, but was mortified when the only sound she made was a sob, at once muffled and amplified by the cup of her palms. And that was all it took. She was down for the count. “I’m sorry,” she managed, screwing her eyes shut tight as she breathed the hot, salty air inside her hands. “I don’t…I just…haven’t _slept_ , and I’m so _tired_ , and I can’t…can’t keep pretending that I’m huh-holding it together…”

The mattress dipped as Josh sat next to her, clasping his hands contemplatively between his knees. “You don’t have to pretend that you’re holding it together, Sam,” he said, tone lacking all of its usual, playful affectation.

“I _do_.” She let her head fall back against her shoulders, pulling in a quavering breath of cooler air. “I _do_ ,” she repeated, more firmly the second time around, sounding very much like she was trying to convince herself of it. “If I _lose_ it, it’s like…like…”

“Admitting it’s real.” When she turned to look at him, face glistening in the low light, Josh met her gaze steadily. “Yeah. Yeah, I…I get that.”

She swallowed hard, pulling the sleeve of her pajamas over her hand before just sopping up as much of her face as she could, still feeling almost inhumanly foolish. “I’m sorry—I know…of _everyone_ I could be doing this in front of…”

Clucking his tongue, Josh heaved a sigh of his own. “You don’t have to be sorry.” He could see she was about to argue it, and he shook his head to nip it in the bud. “It’s…” But then his own throat was tightening, his chest full of glass, and he let the thought trail off into nothingness.

“Yeah.” She nodded, scooping her hair out of her face with a hand. It was hard to say how long they sat there, blankly staring towards Beth’s bedroom door, Sam’s legs dangling over the side of the bed, Josh’s feet firmly on the ground. She was glad for the dim lighting, not only because it meant Josh couldn’t see how puffy her face had gotten, but also because it saved her from clearly seeing _his_ expression. “I miss them so much.” The words escaped her long before she could run them through her mental filter. She pursed her lips to try and keep them from quivering.

“Me too.” He slung an arm around her, pleasantly surprised when he felt the pressure of her head resting against his shoulder. “Meeee too, Sam.” Suddenly acutely aware of his own exhaustion, Josh set his head atop hers, rubbing a comforting stripe up and down her arm with his hand. “Every goddamn day.”

There was a strange, syrupy moment where Sam was fairly certain she was closer to sleep than she had been in days, her insides scraped raw and sinuses throbbing. There was a soothing familiarity about the smell of Beth’s room, a soothing regularity to the hum of the lodge’s heating system kicking on, a soothing warmth with Josh next to her. It was almost enough to make things feel… _okay_ again.

‘Almost’ being the operative word.

She sat up straight once more, turning her head to look over the expanse of the bedroom. “She’d be so mad if she knew we were touching her stuff.” When she met Josh’s eyes again, she was surprised to realize she was smiling.

“Oh, believe me, I _know._ ” Josh exhaled a quiet chuckle before letting his arm drop. With a grunt, he stood back up, picking up the picture Sam had been looking at earlier. “I can actually _hear_ her yelling at me, you know? ‘ _Josh-uh! Oh my God-uh! Get out of my room!’_ ” he snickered, his impression of Beth way too high to even come close to registering. He crossed the room to Beth’s vanity, running a finger along the baubles and notebooks piled on it. It wasn’t long before his hand had brushed over her polished music box. His thumb popped it open, and he absently lifted the lid until the tiny dancer inside began to twirl. Beth had never been much of a jewelry collector, so there wasn’t much inside: an old silver ring, a few long-forgotten hair ties, a ticket stub from a _Harry Potter_ movie…He was about to shut it again when the tinny music caught his attention.

Sam looked up at the sound as well, punctuating a sleepy laugh with a sniffle. “Oh man, I didn’t realize Beth’s was the same as Han’s.”

It took Josh a second to be able to answer her. His tongue felt stuck to the roof of his mouth as the song finished and started up again. Though his memories of it were blurry with time, he had the singular sensation that the song was bad juju. Capital-B Bad. “Y…yeah,” he said, hoping that the pause hadn’t been long enough to be awkward. Without really thinking, he picked the music box up, leaving a perfect rectangle of the vanity clean of dust. “You know how it goes…they always got the twin treatment. One of them gets something, the other does too…” When he tore his eyes away from the box, his gaze flicked apprehensively to Sam.

Unsurprisingly, she didn’t seem to share his feelings about the melody dimly filling the room; instead, she watched from the bed as the dancer spun around, the faintest trace of a smile smoothing out the sadness in her eyes.

Josh slowly walked back to sit on the foot of the bed with her, both of them looking down into the mostly empty velvet lining of the box, wordless with strange shades of grief. Only once the song finished again, did Josh find his voice. “Do you, uh…do you know the song?”

Sam exhaled a weak laugh through her nose before reaching up and swiping at her cheek with her thumb. “Yeah, we learned it in French class. _Frère Jacques_. Old nursery rhyme.” She looked back up at him curiously, “You…don’t know it? You’re the one who got them these.” To her point, she tapped at the metal plate behind the dancer, emphasizing the curlicue ‘ _From Josh’_ at the bottom.

He tried to smile, doubting entirely that it even came close to looking genuine. “We had a tape—a video, or some shit—with it when we were kids. But fuck me sideways if I remember the words.”

Again, Sam laughed softly, pulling her legs up to sit crisscross on the mattress. “God, it’s been a long time since French class. And I’m not singing it, so don’t even get _that_ in your head.”

_Good_ , Josh thought to himself, suppressing a shudder for reasons he couldn’t quite remember. _No singing, please_. He didn’t trust himself not to say it out loud, just then, so he simply smiled back at her.

“Frère Jacques, frère Jacques, um…dormez-vous, dormez-vous.” She stared down at the dancer in concentration, a deep crease appearing between her eyebrows as she mechanically recited what she could remember. “…oh no…um…something-something les…matines…something-something les matines, ding dang dong, ding dang dong?” Sam turned her eyes back up to Josh with a grimace that smacked of embarrassment. “I _think_. But ‘ding _dang_ dong’ can’t be right…right? That doesn’t…that doesn’t sound…right…” She leaned back, setting her weight against her hands as she stared out into middle-space, mouth still tracing the shapes of the words in an attempt to jog her memory.

The lid of the box shut with a dusty _click_. As childish as it made him feel, Josh just couldn’t listen to it again. Something about it set his teeth on edge, and the darkness of Beth’s room didn’t exactly help. It had all the makings of a C-list horror movie. Dead twins? Check. Grieving friends poking around their bedrooms? Check. Spooky fucking music box, complete with dancing ballerina? Check. All they needed was a Ouija board, a few beers, a _little_ more romantic tension, and then they’d be off to the races. He felt his mouth tighten into what was probably the general shape of a smile again, but there was still no trace of humor behind it. Josh drummed the pads of his fingers slowly against the top of the box.

“Ugh, this is going to bug me,” Sam said with a sigh, rolling her head on her shoulders to ease the stiffness of her neck. “Are you sleeping…Brother Jacques. Or. John. I guess. Whichever. …morning bells are ringing…ding dang dong…oh no, it really _is_ ‘ding dang dong.’ Oh, that’s bad.”

That time, he covered up the shudder a bit better, pushing himself off the bed to replace the music box on the vanity. Almost reverently, Josh set it back down on the spot he’d taken it from, covering the spotless rectangle once again. “Bad songwriting,” he agreed tiredly before lowering himself back onto the mattress next to her. “Leave it to the French.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” He scratched at the back of his neck, rolling his shoulders in an attempt to shrug off the last lingering tendrils of concern the song had sent slithering through his nerves. When he thought he had it (mostly) under control, he lolled his head to the side at an uncomfortable angle, offering Sam a smirk that was much more tired than teasing. “Whaddya say? Think we should give catching some z’s another shot?”

She blew a deflated raspberry, ruffling a few loose pieces of her hair. “Probably. We should at least _try_ to be functional when everyone else comes to help search, tomorrow.”

“Today.”

“Whatever.”

He took to his feet again, offering her his hand with a grand, sweeping gesture. “Well then, by all means, after you, Miss Samantha Lynne Giddings.”

She took his hand but rolled her eyes. “Still not my middle name.”

“I’ll get it one of these days.”

***

**Wednesday, February 26, 2014  
8:36pm**

3 People  
  
hey  
  
lindas heading into town tomorrow for groceries  
  
u guys coming up again or nah  
  


It was absolutely _freezing_ out on the deck, but the air inside the lodge had grown stifling over the past few hours since his father had arrived. Josh had made the executive decision _not_ to mention that in the text, not wanting to skew the odds of the gang returning. He wondered if that was a psych major thing—all the overthinking, the planning what words to use, which to omit. But no, the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that those were all screenwriter things.

The psych major part of it was more likely the roil of anticipation low in his gut and high in his throat as he waited to see someone ( _anyone_ ) start to type out a reply. He was reading too much into it, that much he _knew_. Chris had a late class on Mondays and Wednesdays. Sam liked to hit the gym in the evenings, just like Hannah had. Ashley was still doing her brooding thing since they’d fought. The time it was taking them to respond didn’t mean they were ignoring him, it didn’t mean their answers would be ‘no,’ it just meant that they were doing other things. They were otherwise occupied.

And _fuck_ , didn’t he miss the days when _he_ had been able to let his mind be occupied by things other than the goddamn news reports.

He reached up to tug his hat a bit lower, covering his ears against the chill. It hadn’t been a great day. Hell, it hadn’t been a great week, or a great couple of weeks, but today had just really taken the cake. The cake, the icing, and shit, the ice cream, too.

It had been his own fault, of course, because when it came to things relating to the girls, things were always his own damn fault. He’d been the one to insist on hanging around as Bob relentlessly questioned the officers at the lodge, he’d been the one listening obsessively to that fucking _Radio From the Pines_ show. So it only stood to reason that he’d be the one who heard the shit he hadn’t wanted to hear; he’d heard all about how difficult it was to locate bodies when the snow was this high, how they’d probably have more luck after the first thaw in the spring, how even then it was a gamble because of all the lively and varied wildlife on the mountain. He’d gotten to listen to the theories about crazy old man Filcher or Flidder or whatever his name was—the local nutjob his parents had been _considerate_ enough to only mention in passing to any of them as ‘that weird guy who’s been hanging around the property’ until suddenly two of their kids had up and vanished.

Oh, he’d gotten to hear it all.

His phone buzzed in his hand.

3 People  
  
sammy  
Im absolutely coming up  
Dont worry about shopping for me though I can bring my own stuff for the weekend like last week  
remind me  
  
cheeseburgers are def vegan right  
  
sammy  
Har de har har  
Anyone ever tell you to consider a career in comedy  
They lied to you  
ashley  
Yeah, Chris and I are planning on coming too.  
But like Sam said, don’t worry about a shopping list, we’ll bring some stuff.  
sammy  
For real you guys dont need to be spending money on us  
Well be fine :)  


He furrowed his brow, looking over Ashley’s message. _This_ was the psych major shit rearing its ugly head again. His fingers hovered over his screen, but everything he drafted in his own head came out too confrontational.

Well.

Too confrontational for Ashley, anyway, he was sure.

3 People  
  
what he in class or smth  
ashley  
Migraine. :/  
We were talking earlier though, and we’re definitely planning on it. He’s going to pick me up once class is out on Friday, and then we figured we’d meet you as the bus stop again Sam, same as the last couple times?  
sammy  
Definitely  
:)  
cool cool cool  
just gonna be us 4 fyi  
ashley  
No one else can make it this week?  
no one else is INVITED  
vip party up in here  
ashley  
Oh, well that makes sense. We won’t have to worry about splitting up and one of us taking them around, at least. If we all know the area, it’ll be easier to cover the grounds.  
sammy  
Oh absolutely  


He clucked his tongue and thought very carefully about what he was about to say. When he exhaled, his breath plumed out in front of him in a great, amorphous cloud of steam that was quickly carried off by the wind. This was the part he’d been dreading. This was the part he had really, really hoped _everyone_ would’ve been around for.

3 People  
  
yeah about that  
were not covering any ground  
ashley  
???  
sammy  
Wait what  
Am I missing something  
no more ground to cover ladies  
it has all been covered  
by us  
by the rangers  
and mostly by snow  
thats the problem actually  
SO  
were closing up shop  
search is being “suspended until further notice”  
this weekends gonna be it and then were heading home  


That time, he set his phone facedown on his lap before he could see what either of them had to say. Josh pressed the side of his head against one of the deck’s railings, squeezing his eyes shut until bright speckles of color filled his field of vision. If he started crying out there, his face would freeze. He sure as shit did not have time for that. So instead, he reached up and rubbed at his face with both gloved hands, finding some measure of comfort in the rush of blood it brought to his cold skin.

On paper it all made sense. They had covered every nook and cranny of the property. They had scoured the woods. Sherriff Cline had sworn up and down that her people had even checked the old sanatorium. There was nowhere else _to_ look, there was nothing else _to_ do, and logically…logically, it stood to reason that if there wasn’t anything they could do to aid in the search efforts, then there was no reason for the Washingtons to stay up there in Blackwood Pines. They could listen to the radio just as easily from home. They could check in with the rangers just as easily from home. They could stare out the windows just as easily at home.

And of course, there was another issue. Josh had missed nearly a _month_ of school—not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things, he thought, but a pretty big fuckin’ deal to Bob Washington, payer of tuition. There were always university loopholes and bylaws for cases like this; there would be ways for him to pick up where he left off and finish the semester, even if it took a little extra time. Josh suspected he would _not_ be returning to school, though. Not for a good, long while. Not after this.

Ah, and there it was, the first spillover. _Shit_. Josh tiredly sucked a breath through his teeth as he felt his cheeks go hot and then very, very cold. _Shit, shit, shit_.

There was no point in prolonging the ordeal, so he flipped his phone over again to check the group text. His screen was _full_ of notifications. No surprises there.

3 People  
  
ashley  
Josh, I’m so sorry. That’s…of course we’ll be there.  
sammy  
Wait theyre calling off the search  
Can they do that  
They havent found them  
cochise  
hey i'm here i'm here  
shit  
fuck that noise man  
look maybe they’ll find them before we leave  
that’s still a few days  
ashley  
They absolutely could! The storming up there’s stopped, right? The worst of it, at least. That’s got to make it easier. It was so much easier for us to get around last weekend…it’ll be like that again, I’m sure!  
cochise  
and idk about you guys but i'm still down to do another sweep or two  
like we know the pines we can take another go at it  
ash already said it  
if its just us four we can kick some serious ass  
no worries on any of US getting lost  
ashley  
For real!  


He sighed again, watching his breath swirl away from him. He didn’t _need_ the psych major shit to know that Chris’s sudden appearance wasn’t an accident. Maybe Ashley wasn’t as mad at him as he’d suspected.

Sam’s abrupt absence from the text hadn’t gone unnoticed, either. His chest tightened uncomfortably at the implication. The news would be just as hard for her as it was for him. Distantly, he wondered if he should’ve called her first. Maybe that would’ve been the right thing to do. Too late now.

Too late for a lot of things, really.

3 People  
  
yeah i mean if u guys want  
point is its just gonna be us  
and shits gonna suck  
not about to sugar coat that cuz like how even do u do that  
but  
id just really really really appreciate not being alone for it  
so like  
yeah  
thats it  
i guess  
cochise  
no chance we’d let you do this alone dude  
zero  
ashley  
You know, I’m almost positive I can have my mom call me out on Friday, if you guys are able to meet earlier and head up?  
cochise  
done  
fuck class i'll come and pick you up whenev  
thanks guys  
fr  


Still no Sam.

Josh tapped out of the group text, opening a direct thread with her, instead. Again he felt his insides cringe with regret, realizing only too late that yeah…yeah, this is _probably_ what he should’ve done, in the first place.

sammy  
  
hey  
u ok  


He didn’t have to wait for nearly as long as he’d expected for a response.

sammy  
  
hey  
u ok  
No  


He hit the call button. **  
**

*******

**Saturday, March 1, 2014  
2:15pm**

There had been a concerted effort to make the weekend as normal as possible. In a twist of fate literally _none_ of them had expected…it had actually sort of _worked_.

Thursday night, the three had arrived at the lodge, much in the same way they had every weekend for the past month. There had been a few hours where it was rough, where they had been forced to come to grips with the reality that this would be the last such weekend, but it had only been temporary. They’d spent a considerable stretch of that time standing on the welcome mat in their dripping boots and snow-crusted jackets, exchanging hugs that were just _too_ tight and lasted just _too_ long, no one saying anything, and knowing that they didn’t need to.

They’d filled the hours with movies and video games and snacks, and when they’d gotten too tired to keep their eyes open, they had all piled into Josh’s room, dragging in a second futon so they could all sleep comfortably.

It wasn’t denial guiding their actions anymore—if anything, it was a terrible kind of acceptance. Josh and Sam were miserable, Chris and Ashley were wracked with guilt. They all knew it, they all saw it, and that was what drove them to crack jokes, make faces, let bygones be bygones. The past month had been hard. Once the thaw came and the girls’ bodies were recovered, things would only get _worse_. They needed normalcy. They needed a _break_. So they took it.

They had just finished eating lunch Saturday afternoon when Sam felt a wave of grief threatening to bubble up again. She spun her empty bottle of water on the table and tightened her lips into something vaguely resembling a smile, trying to force the errant thought back down.

It was Ashley who noticed first, a worried line appearing between her eyebrows as she watched Sam. “How you doing, Sam?” she asked, folding her hands in front of her, atop the table.

She shrugged, all at once very aware of everyone’s eyes on her. “Okay.” Her lips pursed slightly, a telltale warning. “I was just thinking."

“A dangerous pastime,” Chris tutted, shaking his head.  
  
Her smile was a little more genuine that time. Sam raised and lowered her shoulders in a jerky shrug. “It’s stupid.”

“Stupid is like…kind of our specialty, if you hadn’t noticed.”

She hadn’t wanted to go into it, not really. But as if her muscles weren’t her own, her lips were moving of their own accord. “I always had…this dumb tradition, whenever we’d come up here, you know?” With a flick of her finger, she sent the bottle spinning again. “Hannah thought it was so stupid. But it was like. My thing.” The others were quiet, and she felt the nagging burn of their eyes on her again. “I’d just go and soak in the tub upstairs for a while. Just chill. Clear my mind, zen out, just relax.” There was no reason for her to be thinking about it with such _nostalgia_ , given that she’d only done it a few weeks ago, but just then it felt like some faded memory on the periphery of her mind. The tub was as distant as the smell of her grandmother’s perfume or Christmas morning when she was eight, or the first concert she’d attended. “It’s…it’s just weird to think that…” her shoulders managed another half-shrug, “I might not get to do it again.”

Silence.

“Why don’t you go take a bath now, then?” Ashley resisted the urge to reach out and set her hands over Sam’s, if only to make her stop fidgeting as badly as she was. It was (and had been) disquieting to see _Sam_ , of all people, so shaken, of late. “I mean, it might be nice, right?”

It was Sam’s turn to go quiet, staring pointedly at the bottle as she spun it.

And in all honesty, she didn’t need to say it. It had been on _all_ of their minds since they’d arrived. It was the reason they were all sleeping in Josh’s room at night. None of them wanted to be alone. The lodge was too big and their thoughts were too loud. There was safety in numbers.

There was a loud squeal as Josh pushed his stool away from the kitchen island, smacking both of his palms against the tabletop. “Easy solution. We _all_ go take a bath. Come on.” He nodded towards the staircase, leaving the others to stare after him.

“Uh, excuse me?” Chris asked, getting to his feet nonetheless.

“Yeah no offense, but I’m not really sure _any_ of our relationships are prepared to weather _that_ particular sentence,” Ashley added.

Rolling his eyes, Josh turned to walk backwards, opening his arms to them all. “Tub’s big enough for like eight people. It’s _technically_ a spa. A hot tub. No one has to get naked. I mean, unless you _want_ to, in which case, far be it from me to tell you how to live your lives. Life is only as sexual as you make it, my friends.”

“Can I print that on a t-shirt?”

Ashley and Sam exchanged a look, their expressions matching masks of incredulity. “I didn’t bring a swimsuit,” Ashley deadpanned as she turned her attention back to Josh.

“You got underwear, don’t you, Ash?” He dropped her a lascivious wink before disappearing around the corner.

The girls looked at each other for a second longer before Ashley dropped her head into her hands, shaking her head in obvious disbelief. “I guess I do.” She got up from her stool, waiting until Sam joined her to head for the stairs. “So much for ‘just soaking’ and getting to ‘clear your mind,’ huh?” she asked.

Surprising herself, Sam managed an exhausted chuckle. “Yeah, this isn’t exactly the way I pictured this unfolding.”

“Get used to _that_.” Ashley was already tying her hair back into a loose ponytail. “Never a dull moment with those two.”

“I’m definitely coming to realize that.”

It wasn’t until a few minutes later when the tub was full and everyone had started awkwardly slipping themselves into the water that it happened. Sam was halfway through lowering herself into the tub when she was struck with a wave of déjà vu so strong and so solid that she nearly lost her balance. It took her a moment to place it, but then it snapped back to her like an overstretched rubber band. Despite herself, she couldn’t help but laugh aloud, tipping her head back against the edge of the tub as she sank her body further into the water.

The three other corners of the tub went silent again, everyone momentarily forgetting the strange, bizarrely intimate atmosphere of a shared bath.

“Well, looks like it’s happened, kids,” Chris sighed, the sound of his voice bringing another burst of giggles from Sam. “She’s spent too much time around us. She’s lost it. I _knew_ this would happen. So sad.”

“You _hate_ to see that happen,” Josh agreed.

Ashley turned to her again, both of her arms crossed anxiously over her chest. “You uh…you doing okay?”

She felt so _stupid,_ but she couldn’t _stop,_ waving a hand to try and signal that she only needed a second to collect herself. That second became two, became three, and she realized that whoops, this was a real fucker of a laughing jag she’d hit. “Looks like you finally got your fourth, huh? Only took _a month_.” She giggled again, actually reaching up and covering her face as she laughed.

There was another stretch of silence from the other side of the tub before Josh spoke up. “Oh my God, literally _what_ are you talking about, Sammy?”

“The _orgy!_ ”

The water in the tub crested in a wave as Chris physically reeled back. “ _What?_ ”

“The…the…” And now there were tears—real, literal _tears_ —streaming down her face as she fought to catch her breath. “In the…woods! The ritual…the _ritual!_ ” When she managed to pull her hands away and steal a peek at the others through her hands, she was met with three identical looks of shocked confusion, everyone’s eyes wide and mouths open, and _shit_ that just made it worse. Sam gasped for breath, trying desperately to explain. “In the…the hot tub that night! When I found you guys outside!”

“Oh Jesus Christ.” Finally, it clicked, and Chris pressed a hand to his heart, exhaling a heavy breath of relief. “Holy balls, I had… _no_ idea what you were talking about. Thought we were gonna have to get your _head_ checked, Sam, oh my God.”

Slowly it dawned on Josh and Ashley, both of them remembering the night as well. Then, they were _all_ laughing. Once they got started, they found it was nearly impossible to stop.

***

**9:05pm**

“No. Say it again, but slower this time.”

“Why do I have to say it again? Clearly you heard me the first time.”

“Oh, I heard you. I heard you loud and clear, Sammy. The _issue_ is that I’ve never heard a human being string those words together in that order before, so I’m gonna need you to give it one more go-around.”

“You’re so weird.”

“Noted.”

“This will be the first time I watch _The Shining_.”

Ashley leaned against the wine rack, staring blankly out the kitchen window as she listened to Sam and Josh in the great room, voices muffled by the wall. “This is a bad idea,” she intoned flatly, glancing over her shoulder just in time to watch Chris pour a frankly _disgusting_ amount of melted butter onto the popcorn. “… _that’s_ a bad idea, too.”

“What? It’s margarine. Sam can eat margarine. It’s fine.” He spun the metal bowl with a dramatic cascade of ‘ _oooh_ ’s and ‘ _ahhh_ ’s before chuckling, walking around the island to drop the buttery measuring cup into the sink’s basin.

“I _meant_ the movie, mostly.” She looked back out the window before turning around entirely, pressing the small of her back against the countertop. “Do you think it’s gonna be…all right?”

In response, Chris mirrored her stance, leaning back against the sink. He propped his arms back against the counter, letting his gaze slide upwards to the ceiling. “Aw c’mon, Ash. You know the spooky movies make him feel better. One more isn’t gonna hurt.”

Her palms cupped her elbows self-consciously. As it so often was so often those days, her mind was a messy whirl of disconnected thoughts and unfounded anxieties. There she was, Ashley Brown, she of the million-or-so practiced conversations, and yet she found herself at a loss. Of all the discussions she imagined in her head at night, trying to fall asleep, she had to admit she’d never quite imagined this one. She realized Chris was staring and snapped herself out of her cloud of thought, shaking herself out mentally. “Oh, no, trust me, I’m not…It’s not that I’m worried about _Josh_. I mean. I am. But he knows what he’s getting into. I’m just not sure it’s a great idea for _Sam_.”

“You know what I think?” Chris sighed and shifted his stance, jokingly setting one of his elbows on Ashley’s shoulder, using her as an armrest. “I think…that it’s some _hilarious_ twist of fate that two of the biggest, scardiest, chickeniest weenies in the _world_ ended up being friends with the horror movie buff. That’s what _I_ think.”

She looked up at him with an unimpressed sneer. “I’m not _scared_.”

“Oho! Methinks the lady doth protesteth too much.”

Her lips tightened into a taut line. “Look, I can _deal_ with horror movies—I can! And I _have been!_ That’s not the _point_.” She huffily shrugged her shoulder, pretending to try and shake him off of her as she continued, “Why does it _have_ to be the _specific_ horror movie about people stuck in a _ski resort_ in the _mountains_ during a _snowstorm_ , where…” Momentarily, her eyes flicked to the doorway, the shape of her mouth becoming something marginally more apologetic. “…where a pair of twin sisters get _murdered?_ ”

There was a moment of silence as Chris felt some of the color drain from his face. “…huh. Well…” he seemed at a loss, bottom teeth bared in a rictus of discomfort. “I mean…when you put it _that way_ …”

“Mhm,” Ashley hummed curtly. Her gaze was riveted back on Chris, her expression a matronly ‘I told you so’ scowl. “Maybe not the best movie to facilitate emotional healing, huh?”

His cheeks puffed out in a sigh. She was right. Ashley was _always_ right. Not that there was anything to be done about it just then. “I think he’s made up his mind.”

She rolled her eyes but said nothing, simply shaking her head.

Before either of them could say anything further, Sam and Josh both appeared in the doorway, Josh popping in only long enough to grab the bowl of popcorn from the island. “Yo, Shaggy, Velma, get the lead out, let’s do this.”

Ashley raised an eyebrow. “ _Velma?_ ” she muttered, shooting Chris another reproachful glance.

“Zoinks, you heard the man.” He laughed when she poked a finger into his side, letting his arm drop from her shoulder as they made their way down the stairs to the cinema. Doing his best to seem casual, Chris hung back for a second as Josh popped open the projector room’s door. “Hey, you sure it’s a Kubrick kinda night? Movie’s fuckin’ _long_.”

Josh smirked as he loaded the movie up into the projector, flipping the switch that filled the screen with light. “Wow, so…so you’re choosing _now_ to become a huge wuss? Is that it? Is that what I’m hearing?”

“ _Wuss?_ You insult me, good sir.”

“Come on, it’s a fuckin’ classic—a _timeless masterpiece_. Hardly even _scary_.” And with that, he hit play, and the flat screen burst to life, showing the dizzying opening scene of a tiny yellow car zigzagging its way up a narrow mountain road. “Besides, what else are we gonna watch?”

Chris tapped his chin, pretending to think. “Hmmm…well, if you’re _insisting_ on scary, we could always go _Revenge of the Sith_.”

“Ugh. Dude. In this house, we don’t watch _bad_ films.”

“But it’s so bad the argument _could_ be made for its scariness. Huh? Huh?” Snickering, he let Josh push past him; quickly, Chris turned back around, offering Ashley a hapless shrug as if to say ‘Hey, I tried.’

Josh dropped himself down into one of the cushy seats in the back row, settling in as Sam and Chris took the seats to either side of him, Ashley taking her usual spot next to Chris. “Now I will admit…” he began, grabbing a handful of popcorn and unceremoniously throwing it into his mouth, talking around his crunching and munching. “The opening is unnecessarily long. Builds some real nice dramatic tension, though. Just bear with it.”

They made it about twenty minutes in—all the while making comments about the horrendous fashion of the day, the ridiculousness of the nearly-Transatlantic accent some (and only _some_ ) of the characters spoke with, and the peculiar triangularity of Jack Nicholson’s eyebrows—when Ashley got up and headed for the stairs.

“Hey!” Josh called after her, turning himself around in his seat. “You’re gonna miss—”

She waved it off, “I’ve seen it before. I’m just grabbing a drink. Anyone want anything else?” Waiting only long enough for their chorus of ‘no’s, she disappeared entirely, the quiet padding of her footsteps on the stairs drowned out by the movie’s soundtrack.

Chris had turned around as well, and only looked back to the movie once she was gone, reaching over to the popcorn bowl absently. His fingers missed it once, twice, and then he looked up to find Josh staring very pointedly at him. Oh, they’d known each other _more_ than long enough for Chris to recognize it for what it was: some kind of ass-hattery was afoot. “ _What?_ ” he mouthed, not wanting to interrupt Sam as she watched the Torrances driving up to the Overlook for the first time.

Josh held up an index finger, signaling for him to wait. He set the bowl down on Chris’s lap before brandishing his left arm, pointing with his right index finger again.

Chris raised his eyebrows and shoveled a handful of popcorn into his mouth.

As though leading a child in a game of Simon Says, Josh extended his left arm slowly, never breaking eye contact with Chris. He draped it across Sam’s shoulders, making sure that Chris was watching as he then jerked his chin towards Ashley’s empty seat.

Groaning, Chris rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. He extended a finger of his own in Josh’s direction.

From Josh’s other side, Sam’s head appeared. She looked from Josh to Chris and back again, her brow furrowed. “So…” she said, gesturing vaguely to Josh’s arm. “What’s _this?_ ”

In front of them, the picture on the screen switched to a tight shot of the family inside their little car. “ _They got snow-bound in the mountains,_ ” Jack Nicholson’s jeering voice drawled from the screen. “ _They had to resort to_ cannibalism _in order to stay alive._ ”

Josh met Sam’s gaze before pointedly jerking his chin in the direction of Ashley’s seat again. He looked back down at her, popping his eyebrows up and down knowingly, a corner of his mouth twisting up into his usual smirk

Sam followed his line of sight, still obviously confused. She looked at Chris again, and then it seemed the penny dropped; her eyes widened and she grinned widely up at Josh, stifling a laugh. Turning back to Chris, she nodded frantically, pressing both of her hands jokingly to her cheeks before pantomiming a swoon, leaning more fully against Josh.

Chris groaned again, trying to disappear down into the cushion of his seat.

“ _You mean…they ate each other up?_ ” Projected from the stereo system, the little boy’s voice was twice as grating, emphasizing his macabre intrigue in the subject.

There was a rustling as Ashley reappeared, pulling the cinema door shut behind her. She scooted herself back into his seat, scrunching her face in concern when she noticed the mortified expression on Chris’s face. “Uh…did I miss something?” she asked.

“Nope!” Sam answered cheerfully, reaching over and playfully flicking Josh’s hand from off of her shoulder.

And still the movie rolled on. “ _Well, they had to,_ ” Jack continued, speaking with the sort of calm disinterest that suggested he was explaining to his son that bananas were yellow. “ _In order to survive.”_

***

**Sunday, March 2, 2014  
Early**

The sky was pregnant with the promise of another doozy of a snowstorm…probably the last of the season. He could see it from where he sat at the base of the stairs, staring through the great room’s towering windows. Despite not being able to see the moon, the wintry sky seemed to illuminate the room almost as well as the sun, bringing his attention to the fat dust motes floating in and out of the light like lazy butterflies. But no, that wasn’t right…butterflies only came out during the day. _Moths_ came out at night. This idea struck Josh, and he shuddered at the thought of papery wings and too many legs.

He stared until his eyes felt dry, and then he stood from the staircase, folding his arms across his chest. Someone—one of the bumbling rangers popping in and out of the lodge, no doubt—must’ve knocked into the thermostat or something, because it was absolutely _freezing_ all of a sudden. It was odd, some part of him thought distantly, that he had only noticed it _then_ , as his skin broke out into goosebumps. His breath plumed out in front of him as he exhaled, forming a cloud almost eerily identical to the great, looming monstrosities hanging just over the lodge’s roof. Josh furrowed his brow and continued rubbing his arms to try and warm them up, scrunching his face in thought when his foggy breath obscured his vision again.

“Fuckin’-a, man…” he mumbled, his voice little more than a harsh sigh in the pale cast of the room. The thermostat was in the hall just off the main entrance, so it wouldn’t be too big of a deal to go fix it, but what sort of moron wouldn’t check to see what they’d bumped into? It was rude, is what it was, and more to the point—Josh froze, quite literally, as he took the first step towards the front door and something under his bare foot _crunched_. For a moment, he gripped onto his arms tighter, fingers leaving deep divots in his flesh. It was confusion more than concern that brought him to look down; that confusion only grew when his brain made sense of what he was looking at.

_Snow_.

Josh narrowed his eyes at the realization. Had that snow been there a second ago? How…how had it gotten into the lodge, in the first place? His head swam with questions, filling him with the uneasy sensation of vertigo. Despite all of this, his gaze was slowly drawn forwards, following the strange, icy drift.

It led to the front door. Not in the sense that perhaps someone had left it open and the snow had blown in on the wind, but more like this was some warped version of _Oz_ where the bricks were white and translucent. It looked like a path someone had made. It looked like a path someone had made for _him_.

The snow crunched quietly under his feet as he walked along it, a small voice in the very back of his head thinking dimly that _boy oh boy, Dad’s gonna have a field day when this fucks up the hardwood_. He reached the front door, paying no mind to the stacks of boots and coats on the bench nearby. In for a penny, in for a pound, and he was already beginning to grow numb to the cold anyway, so it didn’t much matter either way, right? Josh took the doorknob in hand, jerking back with a sharp intake of breath when it _pulsed_ in his palm like something living.

“What the…” he bent down to get a better look, fingers already moving inquisitively closer.

“Josh?”

The pads of his fingertips were maybe a hair’s breadth away from the knob when he heard it. Each and every muscle in his body locked up, turning to cement under his skin; the fine hairs on his arms and neck stood on end. Around him, the air grew impossibly colder, almost as though the storm was starting inside of the lodge instead of outside. His body burned at once too hot and too cold with the first pinpricks of terror. The voice had been quiet, really just a whisper, but it had been spoken _directly_ into his ear.

There was someone—some _thing_ —behind him.

Cold-laced exhaustion slowed his mind to an effortful chug. Josh kept staring at the doorknob even as his eyes widened, even as he caught sight of the reflection in its burnished metal. He could see the blurry, amorphous shape standing just behind his right shoulder. It towered over him like one of his father’s grotesque movie creations, its limbs too long and its head too small for its shoulders. His stomach lurched when he saw one of its arms move, the shape of the doorknob warping the reflection _almost_ beyond the point of him being able to understand what he was seeing. It was reaching for him…the thing was _reaching_ for him.

Before he could think himself out of it, he spun around with wide-eyed panic, backing himself up until his shoulder blades pressed against the door. He might’ve shouted, but he wasn’t sure. Not for the first time, he felt his mouth grow dry at what he saw.

There was no creature (horrible or otherwise) standing in the hallway behind him. Mostly because there _was_ no hallway behind him. Where the great room had been only seconds ago, now there was nothing but the snow-covered ground of the woods. The walls of the lodge had fallen away to be replaced by thickets of trees, their bare branches reaching up and up and up towards the stormy sky like skeletal fingers begging for help. It went without saying that the roof was gone, too: the only thing above him was a mass of dark clouds heavy with snow.

“What…the actual… _fuck?_ ” Josh asked, painfully aware of how tight his voice had grown. Over the wind, he wondered if he had made any sound at all, or if his breaths had been vaguely word-shaped. He glanced over his shoulder and recoiled with something like disgust when he saw the front door, same as it ever was. It wasn’t attached to anything anymore, not like a door was _supposed_ to be, and instead just…it just stood in the middle of the forest. He took a step away from it, then two, then three, wandering back to where the great room was _supposed_ to be.

“Josh?”

His head whipped around as he heard the voice again, but it was all but impossible to discern what direction it was coming from. The wind had begun to pick up, whistling through the trees with a sound that seemed to him more like a scream than anything else. He turned in a slow circle, trying to figure out where he was or what was going on. As far as he could see, there were only trees. Trees and snow.

Snow-bright as the woods were, he couldn’t make out any sort of path to follow. All of the snow beneath his feet (still bare, now beginning to turn a dusky shade of purple) looked fresh— _Virgin,_ he thought to himself, _ha ha ha_.

“Josh!”

The voice was growing more insistent, more panicked, and just as he opened his mouth to try and shout a reply above the howling wind, there was a _click_ of recognition. There was a second where the world blurred around him, made only of white and brown smears, then he was running faster than he’d ever run before. Twigs snapped under the soles of his feet yet he was too numb to feel a thing. Surrounded by trees as he was, branches thwapped his chest and shoulders as he pushed through them, tearing at his shirt and bruising his skin. He had no way of knowing if he was going the right way, if he was getting any closer to the voice, but something in his gut told him to press on, run faster, push through the cold.

“Josh!”

“ _Beth!_ ” he called back at the top of his lungs, all but feeling the wind suck the sound from his throat. “ _Beth! I’m—_ ” Without warning, he was sprawling on the ground, chin grinding into the snow beneath him. And fuck, he must’ve been _really_ cold, because it didn’t so much as register on his pain radar. He scrambled back to his feet, blinking in confusion when he saw what he had tripped over.

It was one of the big, overstuffed beanbags from the cinema room. He stared, bewildered, half expecting it to roll away in the wind or lunge towards him or… _something_. But it just sat there on the ground behind him, unmarred except for the divot his leg had made when he fell over it. After giving the beanbag another suspicious glance, he picked up his pace, quickly falling back into his run.

“ _Beth!_ ” he tried again, squinting against a fresh burst of snow blowing into his face. When there was no immediate reply, he changed tack. “ _Hannah!_ ” He passed a tall pine tree, feeling a distant sense of dread as he realized there was something hanging from one of its branches. Just over his head, dangling fifty or sixty-some feet in the air, was the antler chandelier from the dining room. He passed it in a moment, leaving it in his wake, swinging frantically in the wind.

Something red shot past his periphery, and he turned only long enough to see that the forest was suddenly full of the horrible art his mother had decorated the lodge with—the strange abstract color paintings, the tapestries, the portraits, all nailed to tree trunks at eye-level. He didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to puzzle over who would do such a thing or why, and instead just kept sprinting.

“Josh?”

“Josh!”  
  
“Josh.”

“Josh?”

The wind carried his sisters’ voices until the sound of his name meant nothing to him, but all he could see were trees. Twice he slipped and stumbled, but caught himself before he could fall again. The voices never seemed to get any _closer_ , and that was the maddening part of it all. He could _hear_ them, he could _hear them!_ They had to be close, didn’t they? But he couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and wasn’t that the damnedest thing because suddenly that old saying made some sort of fucking _sense_.

Just as he had that thought—literally the precise _moment_ it crossed his mind—he stepped out into a clearing. The change was so jarringly instantaneous that his vision spun. One second he had been in the middle of the goddamn woods, the next he was at the fire pit, staring straight into a crackling bonfire. His throat tightened. “H-Hannah?” he called out weakly, his voice hoarse, his mouth tasting like copper. “Beth?”

No response.

Suddenly, his exhaustion came crashing down around him, sending him staggering to the nearest bench. Josh sat, easing his unsteady descent with one of his hands. The fire was so bright against the snow that he could feel his eyes beginning to water from the intensity of it, yet be it from the cold or his fear, he swore there was no real _heat_ to it. Part of him ached to test that theory, to reach out and stick his hand into the tantalizing flames, but his body felt very leaden just then. His legs felt as if they were made of stone, their muscles cramped and gnarled as the ancient roots he’d had to avoid tripping over. “Beth?” he tried again. “Hannah?” They came out as sighs, and all at once his tongue felt too heavy for his mouth.

It was the sound of metal on metal, that horrible high-pitched screech of rust, that caught his attention again. Though he didn’t know why, Josh glanced upwards, feeling his stomach lurch down into his feet. Dangling from the sky, not unlike the chandelier of antlers he’d spotted earlier, was the massive sculpture from the great room. Its chain rose up into the clouds, far past his line of vision, the twisted ball of metal hanging maybe fifteen feet above his head. It rocked back and forth and back again, each time filling the air with that terrible nails-on-a-chalkboard whine. But that wasn’t the upsetting part.

“Hannah?” He tried to stand only to find he physically couldn’t. Josh craned his head back, watching the shape inside the sculpture. “Hannah, holy _fuck_ , get down from there!”

If she heard him, she didn’t immediately show any sign of it. Content as could be, Hannah sat inside the sculpture, supported by one of the many twisting beams. She held a beam in each hand, her legs poking out and dangling below her; she looked every inch a child on a swing, rocking herself to and fro. Finally, she looked down to Josh, smiling in the serene, reserved way she had. It was the sort of smile that suggested she was anxious about what she was going to say next. It was _also_ the sort of smile, he thought, that suggested she had a secret. “Do you know the story of the Blackwood Sanatorium?” she asked him, cocking her head to one side. Her legs continued to pinwheel lazily in the air above his head. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…it’s an oldie, but a goodie!”

Josh blinked up at her. “What?”

Hannah giggled quietly before returning to her swinging, pivoting her hips just slightly, as to make the ball twist on its chain. “Oh _what?_ ” she laughed. “Do you have something _scarier?_ ”

He looked back down, realizing belatedly that she was hanging _directly_ over the bonfire. Josh couldn’t remember too much from his science classes, but he had a pretty good grasp on the basic principle of ‘Fire Bad.’ Even if that weird, ghostly chain held her weight, the sculpture was _metal_ , and metal heated up pretty damn fast. If she didn’t get down from there, she’d _roast_ like that butch cop from the shitty _Silent Hill_ movie, and—

Entirely unaware of his panic, Hannah began to hum a song to herself, the wind carrying only snippets back to Josh.

“Hannah,” he said, trying to force his throat to handle his ‘concerned older brother’ voice. “You need to come down. You’re going to fall into the fire.”

“All we wanted was a fun weekend,” she replied, her smile gone, her voice frighteningly toneless. “Where everyone just hung out. None of this is fun, Josh.” And then, as if nothing had happened, she back rocking herself back and forth again, humming that same soft melody.

He tried to stand up again, still finding it impossible. Josh reached up with both arms, straining against his own body’s weight as he tried to grasp one of Hannah’s legs. She was too high up, but only _just_. If he could manage to stand, if he could get up onto the bench, then maybe…

His spine threatened to judder its way out of his skin when the wind died. The sudden lack of noise brought on a crippling wave of tinnitus, both of his ears ringing with such an intensity that he thought he might go mad. Josh flattened his hands against his ears until the ringing passed, but it was only tentatively that he removed them. Without the backdrop of the screaming storm, the only competition for Hannah’s voice was the popping of the fire and the rhythmic squeaking of the sculpture-turned-swing on its chain. He could make out her song then, in perfect, horrible clarity.

_Oh shit_. He had meant to say it, but had only managed to _think_ it. The muscles in his jaw felt overly loose.

“Are you sleeping…are you sleeping…”

Josh jumped at how _close_ the second voice was. He stared wide-eyed at the spot next to him on the bench. The spot that had been empty, up until a second ago. The spot that was now occupied by Beth. Unable to process this development, he gawked at her, Hannah’s humming serving as a discomforting soundtrack to the reunion. Beth sat hunched over with her elbows on her knees, her head hanging in such a way that her hair hid her face from his view.

Above them, Hannah’s humming gave way to words, the sound floating on the air like so many snowflakes. “Frère Jacques…Frère Jacques…”

Beth’s voice came again from behind the unmoving curtain of her hair. “Are you sleeping…are you sleeping…” She was off-tempo from Hannah, almost as though the two of them had decided to sing in a round. It was disquieting to say the very least.

“Beth,” Josh began, trying to keep the waver from out of his voice. “Tell Hannah to get down before she hurts herself.”

“Are you sleeping…” It was the only answer she gave him, voice stilted and droning, her body never moving. Another screech rang out between them as Hannah continued to swing.

He looked up from one sister to watch the other, feeling his eyes begin to grow dry from the fire’s light. “ _Hannah!_ ” he called again, “We need to go _home_. Both of you need to come _home!_ ”

From beside him, Beth spoke up again. “You’re still sleeping…”

“Han— _that’s not even how the song goes!_ ” He whirled back to Beth mid-plea, hands tightening to grip the wooden bench with a crushing pressure. “You guys need to come _home!_ Stop fucking around and let’s just _go_ before something _bad_ —”

Never flinching, Beth’s voice suddenly became shockingly louder. “You’re still sleeping you’re still sleeping you’re still sleeping you’re still sleeping _you’re still sleeping you’re still sleeping you’re still sleeping…_ ” She spoke faster and faster, her words still _wrong_. Had they not been out in the middle of the woods, lost and cold as they were, Josh might’ve thought it was just one of those sibling things; he said she was screwing the lyrics up, so of _course_ she’d keep doing it, but there was something frantic in her voice that he didn’t like, something that filled him with crepitant waves of panic.

“ _Stop_ it!” he snapped, finally grabbing hold of her shoulder and shaking her. “Both of you, just… _stop it!_ We need to go _home!_ ”

Under his hand, Beth was unspeakably pliant. She may as well have been a sack of meat, sloshing around without any bones to speak of. Her form moved gelatinously as he shook her. _“You’re still sleeping you’re still sleeping you’re STILL SLEEPING WHY WON’T YOU WAKE UP?!”_ As she shouted ( _screamed_ , really), her head finally rolled towards him, her hair falling away to reveal what was left of her face. Her skin had gone the motley grey-purple color of a bruise, her lips peeling back and away from her skull in such a way that her teeth seemed to be grinning at him. Her eyes were nothing more than the sunken black pits of a Halloween decoration, the lids and flesh plucked away by ravenous wildlife, no doubt.

Before he could react to the gruesome remains of her, the sound of the sculpture again filled the air: this time with a shuddering whine. He looked up just in time to see one of the links of the chain begin to warp and stretch under Hannah’s weight. He could see it coming apart, already picturing in his mind’s eye how quickly the structure would fall into the fire, how Hannah would be trapped in it like some kind of cage. He tried to stand again, but Beth’s hands had grabbed onto his arm with a vise-grip, keeping him wrought helplessly to the bench. All the while Hannah kept singing, Beth kept singing, the wind started screaming again, and the sculpture began to fall from the sky.

Josh sat up with a quiet gasp, the air filling his lungs like the first breath of a drowning man breaching the surface. Immediately he squeezed his eyes shut against what felt like a blinding amount of light ( _The fire,_ his brain struggled to remind him, _it’s the fucking fire!_ ), his hands flying up to cover his face. He could feel his heart in his throat, banging away like a freight engine, but already the nightmare was beginning to slip away from him. He could remember the cold, could remember Hannah and Beth’s faces, but…everything else was already growing dim and faint. After what could’ve been a minute, could’ve been less, he lowered his hands. Still squinting against the light, his vision started to return to him.

And it was then that he realized he was being stared at.

He jolted in an aftershock of fear when he blearily made out the two girls at the foot of his bed, mouths hanging open; his forehead creased in confused relief when, after blinking a few times, Ashley and Sam came into view (not his sisters, _of course_ it wasn’t his sisters), both watching him with unguarded looks of shock. “Uhh…” Josh said, voice still husky with sleep. “So what’s…” he turned slightly to find Chris sitting up in bed next to him, his hand still wrapped around the pull-cord of the bedside lamp. The combination of the startled expression and lack of glasses made Chris nearly unrecognizable to his tired mind. “What’s, uh…all this?” He looked back to the girls, realizing belatedly that they weren’t just staring from their futons against the opposite wall, but they were literally _on_ the foot of the bed, half-kneeling, half-leaning. Something about it…wasn’t right. His heart continued to hammer in his chest, and he tried to ignore it. “Are we all…having second thoughts about that orgy idea after all? Is that what this is?” He forced a corner of his mouth to turn upwards, but it felt unnatural.

None of them said anything. They all just kept _watching_ him like he was a bug under a piece of glass. All the while their expressions remained the same: surprised, concerned, and maybe, just maybe…he thought he saw some fear in there, too.

“ _What?_ ” he said again, a little more forcefully. He looked between the three of them again, his face heating up with the burn of humiliation. Clearly, he had done _something_. Not knowing _what_ , though…well that was making it ten times worse.

He was looking at Chris when Ashley spoke up from the foot of the bed, her own voice very small in the relative silence of the bedroom. “You were screaming.” She said it with a strange inflection that he couldn’t quite place, and when he met her eyes he didn’t care for the pity he saw gathering there. “You just…started _screaming_.”

Josh opened his mouth to reply, only to find he didn’t know what to say. Mechanically, he made himself smile again, snorting out a breath meant to sound like a laugh. “No I wasn’t,” he said, flashing the group a ‘you gotta be kidding me’ leer before realizing how serious she was being. “No, I…I wasn’t,” he repeated, the statement sounding a bit more like a plea, the second time around. He turned to Chris again, searching his face for any sign of humor that could suggest they were just joking around. No such luck. He stared back at Chris disbelievingly, feeling his face fall. “I…wasn’t.” Third time was usually the charm, but in that particular case, it was impossible to keep the shame from out of his voice.

“Josh…” Sam said quietly, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn her way again. He didn’t want to see how she was looking at him.

To save himself the indignity of feeling the others’ pitying stares, he covered his face with his hands once more, flopping back down atop his pillow. The nightmare was _gone_ , leaving nothing but the faint imprint of his sister’s voices and their music box melody in the back of his mind, but _this?_ This was inescapable. This wasn’t going to fade away just because he woke up or went back to sleep or blinked really hard. Josh didn’t need to see the others to know the sorts of looks they were exchanging at that very moment, and he definitely didn’t want to hear whatever soft assurances they were preparing to placate him with.

But no one said a word. Not a single word.

With his eyes screwed shut and his hands firmly planted over his face, he had no idea which of the girls moved first, but he felt the dip of the mattress and the rustling of the blankets as one of them crawled into the space between him and Chris. Not even a moment later, there was a second dip, a second rustle, and the bedsprings groaned with the weight of four people. The bed was not _made_ for four adults, that much was sure, but Chris clicked the lamp off again and somehow they found a way to pile themselves in. It was cramped, it was warm, but it was…nice. They would all wake up to find at least one arm or leg had fallen asleep under the weight of someone else, but that would be hours and hours later. Just then, in the safety of the dark, arms tangled and legs readjusted and breaths evened back into the slow tattoo of sleep.

Thankfully for him (and the other three), the rest of the night passed dreamlessly for Josh.

***

**3:45pm**

There was very little talking as they set about closing up the lodge. It was equal parts solemnity and sleepiness that kept them quiet, the lodge full of the same oppressive air as a funeral home. And it did feel like a funeral in a way—at least a _wake_. It was a final viewing of a well-loved extension of themselves, an opportunity to say their goodbyes not to Beth or Hannah, but to the memories of them. Their feet had walked along the floors, their fingers had grasped the doors, they had laughed into the air, they had slept in the beds and on the couches and in the chairs.

Each sheet they laid over each piece of furniture felt like a burial shroud, transforming the great room into a joke of a haunted house attraction, packed to the brim with strangely shaped ghosts. _They_ were ghosts too, in a sense, grey and listless versions of themselves, haunting the spaces they used to occupy in what felt like a past life.

They went about wrapping the furniture and emptying the kitchen of perishables, wiping down the bathrooms and packing up clothes; everything else was closed up as it was, the girls’ rooms becoming hermetically sealed tombs. No one could bring themselves to step foot into either of the twins’ bedrooms, much less consider touching anything that belonged ( _had_ belonged) to them.

And that was how the Washington Estate became the Washington Mausoleum, left to gather dust and snow until such a time that the curse could be lifted or, at the very least, bodies could be found.

The snow underfoot was watery with the promise of spring, giving them glimpses to the dead grass and mud trampled down by so many officers’ boots. There was still a chill in the air, but it was clear that winter was on its way out, much in the same way they were. With the sun overhead, casting deep shadows across the grounds, the lodge looked like a very different place than it had a month ago.

To be entirely fair, all four of them had separately been entertaining the sickening notion that they probably looked like very different _people_ than they had been a month ago, as well.

They had made it about as far as the edge of the yard, packs heavy on their backs, when Sam stopped. Without warning, she turned back around, snow and mud squishing noisily under her boots as she cast one last, long look towards Blackwood Pines. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest in a gesture that had nothing to do with how cold she was, the rims of her eyes uncharacteristically red. Her mouth had pulled itself into a shape none of them had seen on her before, save for _maybe_ Ashley, that night the two of them had spent in the guest room. It was Chris who stopped next, hesitantly facing the lodge as well, his hands anxiously toying with the straps of his backpack. His shoulders rose and fell with a sigh that escaped silently into the air, and he couldn’t help but feel that the lodge had swallowed up each and every happy memory he’d had of the Washingtons; that he’d left them there, wrapped up tightly under a dust sheet, hidden away in one of the doors under lock and key. Ashley stopped too, but it was a struggle for her to turn her gaze back to the lodge. Every time her eyes so much as brushed past one of the windows, she found herself horrified that she find a ghost staring back, mouth open wide in an accusatory scream. There were no tears though, she was surprised to find, as though the lodge had already taken its tithe of her.

Josh was the last to stop, and the last to stare, and the last to trace the shape of the lodge’s eaves with his eyes. He was shocked to find that he didn’t feel much of anything about the moment. He didn’t really feel much of anything about _anything_. Maybe it was acceptance, maybe it was denial, maybe it was how troubled his sleep had been, maybe it was another shitty side effect of his meds, maybe it was some impossible combination of everything. He couldn’t tell. He had no real desire to parse it out, either.

For as long as their family had owned the lodge, Josh couldn’t remember _one single time_ where his parents hadn’t been forced to drag him (and the girls, a nasty voice in the back of his skull reminded him) back down the mountain. When they were at Blackwood, they never wanted to leave. Except right now, where he did in fact, want to leave. He wanted to leave very, _very_ badly, in fact. He wanted to take off sprinting down to the cable car, wanted to fucking zipline down the wires instead of waiting for the old beast to chug its way to the base of the mountain. He wanted to run home, wanted to throw open the doors to their house, wanted to burst into the girls’ rooms and find them waiting there, sitting on their beds with confusion and laughter in their eyes. He wanted. He _wanted_.

Sam had made herself look away after a time, the shadow of the lodge against the sun tattooed on her retinas. Her gaze fell on Josh, instead, and the bizarre, absent expression of his face. Sidestepping closer, she laid her hand on his forearm, her brow creasing with worry as she tipped her face up to try and lessen their difference in height. “Are you gonna be okay?” She waited to ask it until he looked down towards her, keeping her voice as even as she was able.

Josh turned his eyes from her back to the darkening shape of the lodge, acutely aware of Chris and Ashley in his periphery, watching him and Sam. He took a deep breath in, wetting his lips as he tried to find something to say. With no small measure of wonder, he realized that he had no answer to that particular question—he couldn’t even begin to _guess_. A faint plume of fog escaped him as he exhaled, its wisps and whirls slowly rising up into the trees. Looking back to Sam, he momentarily put his hand over hers, offering a squeeze that wasn’t half as reassuring as either of them had hoped it would be. “Well…guess we’re gonna find out, aren’t we?” He watched as her carefully maintained expression faltered, knowing full well that it wasn’t what she had wanted him to say.

But it was the only answer he had, so it would have to do.

It would just have to do.


	4. Where they (bury the twins)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Relevant warnings for this chapter: Angst, lots of death talk, the author doing her best to lay the groundwork for shippy stuff even though that is (admittedly) not her strong suit.

**Saturday, March 29, 2014  
10:35am**

“Last year, maybe like…three weeks after first semester started and we had just gotten settled into our dorm, I got a call from one of our friends, Zach. And as soon as I heard his voice, I just like…I just _knew_ that something bad was up. I even remember saying ‘Dude you’re freaking me out, what’s wrong?’ after he’d only said like ‘Hey what’re you doing?’ because it was _so_ noticeable. And he asked if I was alone and I told him no, that Josh was there too, and he told me to put him on speaker and I did, and that’s when I _really_ knew that shit was fucked, because who _does_ that, right?”

Ashley’s hands were folded on her lap. She stared down at them, silent as a specter, not wanting to interrupt. They’d been sitting in the parking lot for the better part of fifteen minutes, listening to the engine click as it cooled down. She’d been startled when Chris broke the silence as suddenly as he had, his story seemingly apropos of nothing, but there was a taut quality to his voice that suggested it was something he needed to purge himself of. So she listened.

“And he told us that he’d been on the phone with the Colemans all morning, that Nate had been in a car wreck, and that he’d died on the way to the hospital. I—you probably don’t remember Nate, I mean, he was in the year above _me_ so he was already a senior when you were a freshman, but maybe you do? He was the one who got his arm stuck in the vending machine in the science wing that one time?”

Even though she only barely remembered anyone by that name (admittedly, the questionable claim to high school notoriety felt a little more familiar), she finally lifted her eyes from her hands to watch as he spoke. He didn’t look towards her, his own gaze fixed on the grill of the green Jeep parked in front of them; all the same, she undid her seatbelt and swiveled to better face him, pulling both of her legs up under herself.

“We hadn’t hung out in a while because of school and just that like…natural, shitty drift where you fall out of touch with high school people. I mean really, it had been almost a year because he went and moved to go to school a few hours away, and the last time we _really_ did anything together was at his grad party the summer before that, so…I don’t know. I guess I thought…I thought maybe it wouldn’t be _that_ hard. I thought maybe it would be sad and uncomfortable and it would suck, but it wasn’t like we were as tight as we used to be. He pretty much wasn’t in our lives at _all_ , at that point, so how would _this_ be any different?” For the first time since they’d gotten into the car, Chris dropped his hands from the steering wheel. His head bumped against the headrest as he leaned back and closed his eyes. He’d thought he’d had a point when he started the story, but _now_ it felt as though he was mid-puke, trying to force himself through the dry heaves before he could straighten back up and get on with his day. “That sounds. Incredibly fucking shitty. I know.”

Ashley reached over to wordlessly set her hand on his forearm. She gave it a tiny, reassuring squeeze, and though she knew it was probably only her imagination, she could’ve sworn she felt the hammering of his pulse through the fabric of his suit jacket.

“So we all planned to meet up and drive to the funeral together—just us, the guys, the old gang. Or at least what was left of us. Me and Josh and Zach and Manny and Brody. And it was so… _weird_ , because it was like…it was like we were all getting together for a reunion or some shit, you know? We hadn’t seen each other in months, hadn’t really hung out in months, we were all so busy with our own lives and all that…but there we were! All meeting up at the Washingtons’ first because…well, because obviously, right? I just remember all of us in the rec room. We said we didn’t want to be the first ones there, since that would be awkward, but really that wasn’t it, I don’t think. I think we just needed to…I don’t know what we needed to do. But we were all just like, sitting around in our shitty funeral clothes, looking like extras from _The Room_ , and we were kind of…nervously existing. No one wanted to say anything, but no one wanted it to be quiet either, so—I don’t even remember which of us it was—someone started telling stories about when we were younger, the stupid shit we did in class, that kind of stuff. _Obviously_ it turned into stories about Nate. And stories about _all_ of us. Now, you gotta believe me when I say that some of that stuff was _funny_. Like. _Hilarious_.”

She smiled cautiously when he turned to meet her eyes, but still didn’t say anything. Maybe it was irrational, but the last thing on Earth she wanted to do in that moment was disrupt his momentum. A nasty little part of her wondered how much of that was rooted in a desire to stay in the car as long as possible.

“We start laughing, right? Because…because shit’s _funny!_ But then in this weird, creepy moment, we all kind of realize at the same time that aw fuck, this is _not_ time to laugh. Our buddy is dead, really honestly _dead_ , and we’re sitting around Josh’s pool table laughing our asses off. It felt…bad? Wrong. It felt wrong, I think. Because it wasn’t what we were _supposed_ to be doing. We all sort of stop at the same time, too, and everything gets real serious again, so we decide to just bite the bullet and head over to the funeral. Wake? Whatever. We get there, to the funeral home, and before we even walk in, we’re just like…nervous. And none of us wanna _say_ it, because we’re all a bunch of dudes, but we’re pretty fuckin’ _scared_ , too. It was _everyone’s_ first funeral for someone who wasn’t a grandparent, or at least super old. This was one of our _boys_ , one of the _gang_ , not great great aunt Judith, you know? But Zach reminds us that the Colemans told him it was going to be a closed casket, that at least we wouldn’t have to _see_ anything, and that helped. So we went in.”

There was a short lull in the story as Chris grabbed the water bottle from one of the cup holders and took a drink. Ashley let her eyes wander for a second, following the path of a small cluster of people as they walked by the driver’s-side window. They were vaguely familiar, likely faces she’d passed in the halls a couple hundred times over the past four years, but she couldn’t put names to any of them. She looked back to Chris when he cleared his throat.

“The place was…muffled? If that makes sense? There was sad church-y music playing from another room, but it sort of sounded like we were listening to it from underwater the whole time. There were flowers _everywhere_ , and everything smelled like air freshener, and all the furniture was this weird…mint green color that made it feel like you were sitting in a grandma’s house. We see some people we know, so we head into that viewing room, and lo and behold, like five fucking deer in headlights, we all _freeze_ at the same time. Have you ever felt that bullshit? Like in health class, they tell you all about your adrenaline and how it can trigger fight or flight, but they never tell you that there’s a third option. That like, sometimes, when you’re the _most_ freaked out, the _most_ overloaded, you freeze. Just fuckin’…stop moving. _Can’t_ move. We look to the front of the room, and there’s the casket, but that shit isn’t closed, not even a little. It’s wide open, and we can _see_ him. We can _see_ Nate, even from the back of the room, just… _lying there_. And no one moves. No one moves a fucking muscle.”

She squeezed his arm again.

He stopped just long enough to reach up and pull his glasses off, setting them down on the dashboard. “And I know that… _objectively_ , I have to go up there. I have to, that’s what you _do_. You gotta go up there, and you gotta look at the body. Only I can’t make my feet do that because I’m fucking _terrified_. In movies and books and shit, you always hear people say something like ‘Oh they look so peaceful, it’s like they could wake up and be fine,’ but I mean even from the back of the room, that was _not_ the case. And even if it _was_ , I mean, how is that supposed to be _better?_ Who wants to look down at a dead body and go ‘Aw snap, look at them! I wonder if they’re gonna sit up!’ That’s fucking _horrifying!_ And just…”

His voice trailed off, carried on the wind of a frustrated sigh. Implicitly, Ashley knew he wasn’t done, that the story wasn’t over; she had a tendency to cry whenever she was well and truly freaked out, Josh usually clammed up and got distant, but Chris’s mouth ran and ran and ran. This wasn’t the first time they’d done this—she doubted wholly it would be the last.

“Eventually, I went up. _Me,_ leading the pack. Can you believe _that_ shit? Like…since when do _I_ take the lead, huh?” He punctuated it with a derisive laugh, the sound jut a little too high-pitched to be genuine. “Do you know how I finally convinced myself to go up there?”

She shook her head, entirely oblivious to the soothing circles her thumb was rubbing into his arm.

Chris rolled his eyes to the roof of the car. “I kept telling myself over and over again, ‘This is the _hardest_ fucking thing you’re ever gonna have to do. So walk up there. Fifteen seconds and it’s over, and you’ll _never_ have to do anything this bad _ever_ _again_.’” He swallowed hard, letting his head roll onto his shoulder to look in Ashley’s direction again. It was easier to look at her that way, when she was mostly just blurred shapes and colors. “I believed it, too. Believed it enough to walk up to that coffin.” Sucking a breath through his teeth, he kneaded the heel of his hand into his temple. “But it _wasn’t_. It was _not_ the hardest thing I was ever gonna have to do. Going in _there?_ ” he waved more than pointed, hand jerking towards the windshield and what lay beyond it, “ _That_ is the hardest thing. That _right there_. Yeah. Yeah, here I was, thinking that an open casket was the worst thing I could deal with, when _surprise!_ Sometimes there’s fucking _no_ casket, and _no_ body, and _nothing_. Sometimes it’s just…just, just, just _dead fuckin’ air_ and a bunch of people sobbing into it.”

“Back then, it _was_ the worst thing.” Her voice sounded strange after such a long silence. “That day, that time? It absolutely _was_ the hardest thing you could do. And you _did_ _it_. You made it through _that_ , you’re going to make it through this.”

“ _How?_ ” Fixing her with a stare that likely would’ve been more potent had he actually been able to see, Chris furrowed his brow. “ _How_ do I do that, exactly? Going in there and seeing the Washingtons? Seeing _Josh?_ Fuck, Ash, seeing _Sam?_ How? How _precisely_ do we do _that?_ ”

It was a fair question. More to the point, it was a question she, herself, had been grappling with for the past forty-eight hours (if nothing else, the raw patches on her lips, gnawed and red, were a clear testament to that).

Ashley took a deep breath in. She took a deep breath out. Her other hand found its way to Chris’s arm as she squared her shoulders. “We do it,” she began, “By telling ourselves over and over again that this is the _hardest_ frigging thing we’re ever going to have to do.” It clearly wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but she pressed on anyway. “And we’ll get through this _just_ like you got through that. We’ll get through it, and then we will never, _ever_ have to do it again.” A pause, then, for good measure, “ _Ever_.”

He looked down to her hands, his mouth still a tight line. “Yeah. That worked out so well when I said it last time.”

“ _Last time_ ,” Ashley said, leaning over just far enough to pluck Chris’s glasses off of the dashboard. “ _I_ wasn’t there.” She held the frames out, waiting until he slid them on to level her gaze at him. “Hey.” When his eyes met hers, she tightened her lips. “I got your back. You know that, right?”

The urge was strong to drop his eyes again, or suck in a disbelieving scoff, or stick the keys back in the ignition and screech out of the parking lot to leave tire tracks in their wake…but Ashley had said it so earnestly that he felt himself immediately rendered defenseless. “I—of course I do.” He attempted a smile, knowing full well that it was probably a horribly shoddy simulacrum _at best_. It struck him in that moment that there was likely another host of concerns and fears _she_ was dealing with, entirely separate from his own. Suddenly he wanted nothing more than to reach over and brush her hair out of her face, to cup her cheek in his hand. But that would’ve been no different than sitting around the Washingtons’ pool table and laughing about study hall. He didn’t deserve that moment, not when Josh and his parents were inside wishing for something as humane as an open casket service. He set his hand on top of hers instead, offering her the same squeeze she’d given him earlier. “I got yours, too. Always.”

She returned the smile, hers just as uncomfortable and just as tight. Given the circumstances, she thought she would’ve understood if he _hadn’t_ had her back just then. It was a relief she hadn’t realized she’d needed until he said it.

There was another flicker of activity as a grimy sedan pulled up next to them and a couple people got out. The slamming of car doors very effectively shattered whatever atmosphere they’d been cultivating, their eyes immediately drawn to the movement. Almost in unison, they both took in a long breath.

“Think we should…head in?"

“Yeah.” Chris’s hand found the door’s handle before hesitating. “…maybe in like. Two more minutes.”

“Two minutes,” Ashley agreed. “Then we go in.”

“Then we go in.”

***

**12:17pm**

Sam twisted her bracelet back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Everything felt to be moving in slow motion: Life was an old movie playing on a rusty reel, the colors tearing and edges blurred. An uncomfortable numbness had risen from the pit of her stomach to replace the raw ache despair had left behind. She realized she was fighting back a yawn—another one—and was immediately reminded of every crying fit she’d had as a child.

“Hey, hey, yikes, watch it!”

Much slower than she would’ve liked, she came back to herself, eyes flicking up to the source of the voice. Sam blinked tiredly as she took in the shocked, worried expression on Emily’s face. When she registered the touch, she glanced down to where Emily had grabbed both of her hands; the skin under the bracelet was red with agitation, a few tiny red specks warning of friction burn. “Oh—uh, shit.” She let go of the bracelet, fanning her fingers out briefly to show Emily that she’d realized her mistake. “Zoned out, I guess. Um. Thanks.”

“ _Zoned out?_ ” Emily asked her incredulously, having the good graces enough to keep her voice lowered. “You were sawing through your own hand, Sam, oh my God.”

She tried to find the right words to string together to make a plausible excuse, but a dull buzzing from further down the bench caught everyone’s attention and saved her the trouble. Her eyes briefly flicked back to Emily’s face to ensure she had turned to watch Mike return the buzzer to the hostess. In a flash, Sam had pulled out her phone, making every attempt to appear completely consumed by whatever was on her screen. “Oh, you guys go ahead,” she said, barely looking up as the others stood to follow the hostess to their table. “I’ll be right there, just gotta…” she waved her hand vaguely, letting her voice trail off. It took what was left of her mental wherewithal to pretend she didn’t notice Chris and Ashley apprehensively hanging back for a couple seconds.

Once they disappeared from her periphery, she pulled her legs up onto the waiting area’s bench, crunching herself into a protective little ball. She just needed a minute—that was all. Just a minute to think without having to worry about other people’s eyes on her.

Her nail clicked quietly against her phone’s screen as she opened the text thread. It was beginning to feel like second nature by then, and she only briefly skimmed the last conversation with her eyes before typing.

Josh  
  
Hey  
Chris said he told you where we were headed but I wanted to make sure I guess  
Everyones here  
Well I mean  
Us and Em Mike Jess and Matt  
The blackwood gang huh hahaha  
Its weird  
Like really really super weird  
And I totally understand if youre not up to it believe me  
Honestly im not totally sure im up for it :\  
But were going to be here for at least a little so if you want to stop by you should  
If you let me know I can tell you where were sitting  


She stared down at the flurry of texts, feeling her lips press hard against her teeth. Her thumbs rubbed anxiously up and down the ridges of her phone’s case. There was no sign of a response on Josh’s end, not that she had expected one, and of _course_ he didn’t have his read receipts on…

Josh  
  
I hope youre hanging in there  


Sam forced herself to shove her phone back into the pocket of her hoodie once it sent. She got to her feet, setting about smoothing her clothes out before trying to locate the rest of the group.

It wasn’t a difficult task—there were, after all, a _lot_ of them—and she managed a tired smile as she came up on them.

“Everything okay?”

Her lips tightened into something vaguely resembling a smile as she slid into one of the open seats on Chris and Ashley’s side of the table. In the old days, she and Hannah would’ve been across from them, sitting with Emily and Mike and the others. But Hannah wasn’t there (Hannah wasn’t even at the funeral home, really), and somehow Sam had found herself on the other side of some social line she’d never noticed before. “Huh?” she realized belatedly that she’d sunk back into her own head, completely missing Ashley’s question.

Leaning forward to be seen around Chris, Ashley’s forehead creased with sympathy. “You doing okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Mhm, it’s fine.” She’d no sooner flipped her menu open than the server appeared, her chipper greeting silencing the others’ quiet talking with surprising efficiency.

“Ooh, you’re all dressed to the nines,” chirped the waitress, a girl about their age with bright eyes and her hair bobbling in a loose bun on top of her head. “What’re we celebrating today?”

Defying the staggering odds against it, all seven of them managed to grimace at _precisely_ the same instant. An uncomfortable ripple passed through both sides of the table, each of them trying to avoid eye contact while simultaneously (and silently) begging for someone else to answer.

The silence lasted for maybe a fraction of a second, but it felt like a year.

Tired as she was, _miserable_ as she was, it was Sam who spoke up. It was _always_ Sam who spoke up. “We’re…” she began, struggling to find an answer that felt appropriate. “…celebrating the lives of two of our friends.”

“…Oh.”

As it turned out, no one felt like eating much. A few plates of appetizers were ordered and spread across the table in a rare show of solidarity between them all, everyone just picking at what seemed most appealing. Mostly they found themselves talking—not about anything in particular at first, but then slowly, inevitably, about the girls.

Halfway through some ridiculous story about how Beth and Jessica had royally pissed off the yearbook teacher (Sam had only half-remembered it, herself, until Jessica had started giggling, recounting all the school club photos the two of them had snuck into), she noticed a particularly significant look passing between Chris and Ashley. She didn’t ask. The others were laughing, adding the details they remembered, Emily scrolling through her phone’s photo roll to see if she could find one of the pictures in question, and Sam was suddenly very sure she was going to throw up.

There wasn’t a particularly delicate way for her to push her bowl away, and the jerkiness of the movement caught the attention of a few of the group.

“Y’okay there, bud?” Mike asked, his indifference clearly feigned as he took a drink from his glass, one arm slung lazily around Emily’s shoulders. “Find a bug in there?”

She shrugged noncommittally as she stood from the table. “I’m just…gonna check and see if I can get ahold of Josh. I’ll be back in a sec.” And with that, she grabbed her hoodie from the back of her chair, zipped it up, and strode out of the restaurant with a deliberateness meant more to hide her distress than anything else.

Sam only let herself exhale once she was outside, gritting her back teeth against the wave of emotion gurgling its way to the surface. It was too weird—too _fucking weird_ —for everyone to just be sitting there, eating mozzarella sticks, talking about what they’d gotten up to for Spring Break, and pointedly ignoring the ghosts of the Washington siblings looming over them like cigarette smoke. She leaned a hand against one of the benches wrought to the ground and began the comforting routine of stretching her quads.

Right heel towards right hip, hold, breathe.

Switch hands, left heel towards left hip, hold, breathe.

Switch hands, right heel towards right hip…

There was too much buzzing around in her head, in her chest, in her gut. It wasn’t exactly _anxiety_ , but it was something akin to anxious energy, making her feel like she was just a swarm of bees in a person suit. Desperately, she found herself wishing she was back on campus so she could jog to the gym, hang on the climbing wall for a while, maybe do some laps in the pool. Something ( _anything_ ) to stop the ceaseless tingling in her extremities.

Or at the very least, stop the whirlwind of thoughts in her head.

A couple passed by her, pausing long enough to stare strangely, and Sam slowly lowered her foot back to the ground. Whoops.

As far as she’d been able to tell, her phone hadn’t buzzed once while she’d been inside, but there was still a disappointed lurch in her stomach when her home screen didn’t show any new notifications. She opened the text thread again, looking over it as though she’d be able to tell through some psychic link whether Josh had or hadn’t opened her last messages. Perching herself against the armrest of the bench, she stared down at the screen, trying to will him to respond. She thought about calling him, decided against it, reconsidered, decided against it again. Realistically, she doubted any of them would see him again that day. He’d looked _wrecked_ at the service, and though he certainly hadn’t pushed _her_ away, something about having the whole group together again felt…

Bad. It felt _bad_.

And didn’t _that_ suck? How many selfies had she taken with Emily and Mike, over the years? How many football games had she gone to, cheering Matt on from the stands with everyone else? How many scandalous slumber parties had she and Hannah and Beth gone to where Jessica and Emily made them laugh until they cried? How many Homecoming dances, how many Prom after-parties, how many holiday shindigs, how many field trips, lunch periods, summer vacations—and now seeing everyone together made her want to puke her guts out.

She could only imagine how Josh would feel, surrounded by them on all sides.

Her phone went back into her pocket. Sam took a long, steadying breath before reaching up and removing her hairclip, instead tying her hair back into a ponytail with a few flicks of her wrist. It felt better to not have to worry about it coming loose. She began a mental countdown to the moment she’d be able to change into her pjs and cram the remains of today into the bottom of her laundry hamper.

There was a moment of disorientation when she reentered the restaurant, her distracted brain absolutely _at a loss_ as to where their table had been. Sam stood in the waiting area, same as before, taking a few seconds to center herself again. It had been a _long_ day, so it only stood to reason that she’d keep tripping up like that. Understanding that made it no less frustrating. She thought she had a handle on the situation, the memory of finding the group earlier flickering back into her mind, but the sound of familiar voices kept her where she was.

Just a few feet ahead, tucked away in a slightly recessed alcove, were the restrooms. The women’s room was closest to the waiting area, the door left ajar thanks to an old stopper. While she couldn’t hear _everything_ , Sam could make out just enough from where she was standing. Just enough.

“—ou think they—”

“ _Sure_. If tha—e stop you.”

“—ight? I _know!_ ”

The voices became a bit clearer, presumably as their owners moved closer to the door.

“Right. Because this is _exactly_ how I wanted to spend the entire day. Dealing with the almosts and their _scintillating_ small talk.” Emily groaned loudly, punctuated by what sounded to be a paper towel dispenser being used. “Do you think they have _any_ idea how awkward they are? I mean, for real?”

There was a high, tittering laugh from Jessica. “ _Right?!_ It’s like…sad.”

“I think I figured it out, too. What’s so upsetting about them. They’re literally what would happen if social anxiety turned into people. They are the _human embodiments_ of awkwardness.”

“Oh. My. God. That’s exactly it. That’s _exactly_ it!” She laughed again, and Sam startled as the door swung open, both girls walking out. “We’ll bail ASAP.”

“Sooner than ASAP would be preferable, honestly…” Emily muttered, and then the two of them were past her, leaving Sam alone in the waiting area again.

She watched them until they disappeared into the crowded dining room, fingers still absently running up and down the shape of her phone tucked away in her pocket. In their wake, Sam blinked; she knew without really knowing that she had overheard something not at all meant for her. An unpleasant cringe crawled its way up her spine, tip-tapping its way up each individual vertebra as she realized she’d heard them say something similar before.

God, she wished Josh would answer her texts.

By the time she made it back to the table, Emily and Jessica had taken their seats again, already enveloped in an animated conversation with Matt and Mike. She pulled her chair out quietly, sitting down to her mostly untouched salad, again overcome with the sensation that she was suddenly a foreigner in an unfamiliar land. A gentle nudge against her side made her glance over, and the sensation was flipped on its head.

“Any luck?”

She shrugged and lowered her eyes from the looks of concern on Chris and Ashley’s faces, something about the earnestness of their expressions making her feel at once relieved and closer to tears than she had been all day. “Not really,” she conceded, taking a long drink in the hope it would keep them from asking anything else.

One of them sighed so quietly that she couldn’t quite tell which it had been.

“We’ll give it some time. He’s probably got, you know…family stuff holding him up, that’s all.” Ashley didn’t sound terribly confident, but then again, she never really did.

“Yeah,” Chris agreed, nudging Sam’s arm again, decidedly more reassuringly the second time around. “Look, I’ve known Josh forever. He’ll show up eventually. The only thing he hates more than being alone with his parents is being alone, so.” He shrugged, “I’m positive he’ll come around.”

*******

**3:49pm**

But Josh did _not_ show up.

The three of them sat on their side of the table long after Emily and Mike said their goodbyes, after Jessica finger-waved and ducked out, after Matt flashed an apologetic smile and said he’d catch Ashley in Bio on Monday. They sat, perfectly aware of Josh’s empty seat, their eyes occasionally sliding to it in much the same way a tongue prods at the bloodied space left by a pulled tooth. Even as they ordered dessert, they didn’t move to fill in the row the others had left—they just stayed where they were, surrounded by empty chairs.

Chris’s spoon made an unimportant little clink as it was set down on the plate in front of him. “I think we should call it.”

Neither Sam nor Ashley looked up from what they were doing. Sam kept swirling her drink with her straw, watching the ice cubes clink about in the resulting cyclone; Ashley continued to poke at what was left of the brownie sundae on Chris’s plate with her fork, making strange designs in the hot fudge.

“You’re probably right,” Sam sighed, reversing the direction of her straw. “They’re gonna wanna wipe this table down before the dinner rush.”

“That’s not really what I meant, Sam. I—”

“I know what you meant.” She said it softly, without any hint of malice, but she still winced at the sound of her own voice.

Ashley took one last bite of the brownie before setting her fork down. “It’s been a long day. Like. Too long.”

“You can say that again.”

“For _real_.” Chris rummaged around in his wallet, setting down money enough for the three of them, holding up a hand to stop either from protesting. “I got this one.”

“And they say chivalry is dead.”

Arms folding on top of the table, Ashley let her head droop, supported only by one of her shoulders. “I could go for…just the longest nap.” The other two made low, zombie-like sounds of approval, but she only half-noticed. She’d sucked her lower lip into her mouth, her front teeth gnawing at the already raw skin until she faintly tasted salt. “So I’m gonna float an idea…and like…feel free to say no if you think it’s stupid, but…” She gave her lip a soothing lick before sighing. “I don’t know about you guys, but I _seriously_ feel like I might go _bananas_ if I just have to sit with my thoughts all night, so like…do you guys wanna just go to someone’s house and…” she paused, too tired to dwell on whether or not it sounded childish, “Just…lay around? Or sleep? Or watch tv, or _something?_ ”

“Yes.” She’d said it so quickly that both Ashley and Chris sat up a little straighter as they turned to her. “There is literally— _literally_ —nothing I would rather do right now,” Sam added, fingers again anxiously tracing the outline of her phone in her pocket as she stood from the table.

“Hey, you already know I’m game,” Chris agreed, letting Ashley get up before he stood. “You know, uh, given the time—”

“Oh, duh. Sorry Sam, this is like. A regular thing for us. I figured we’d do my place, since Mom’s out ‘til tomorrow, and you guys can definitely stay the night. I mean, if that’s something you _want_ to do.” She shouldered the door open, the three of them moving into the parking lot. “There’s plenty of room. Again, I mean, if you want.”

“I want.” Her phone was back in her palm even as she said it, frowning down at the text thread. “You sure your mom won’t mind us just…barging in?”

There was a chirp, just a little _too_ cheery for the gray afternoon, as Chris unlocked his car. “Pfft. Jamie’s used to it.”

“She is.”

“We’re _always_ barging in.”

“They are.”

Sam smiled, but it was tight. She glanced up from her phone and managed a tired laugh. “Wow. Nice car. Do we have to pick the kids up from soccer on the way back?” she joked, opening the back door of the SUV, assuming Ashley would be riding shotgun.

“Ha ha, you think you’re _so_ funny. And _no_ , we do _not_ need to pick them up. They’re with their _father_ this weekend, and let me tell you, I cannot _wait_ for some me-time.” Chris snickered, but his tone was strangely flat, as though the joke was more habit than genuine. He glanced over his shoulder as he backed out of the parking space, mouth set in a thin line. “Man, I just…really figured Josh would show.”

In the front seat, Ashley sighed. “I’m sure it’s hard. He looked so… _tired_ there, you know? Probably doesn’t want to deal with people anymore.”

Her eyes were on her phone again, fingers hovering over the keyboard. “Yeah. And I’m positive that him not being able to sleep isn’t helping matters.”

There was a pause as she spoke, but her attention was riveted by her phone screen. She barely noticed the tension—she _definitely_ didn’t notice Chris and Ashley turn to share a look.

“He’s not sleeping?” Chris asked, eyes momentarily flicking to the rearview mirror, managing to briefly lock eyes with Sam.

She shrugged. “Yeah, he’s been having trouble since they locked up the lodge, I mean…you guys remember that night.” Even as she said it, she had to suppress the shuddering memory of being woken by his screaming. “And that was, what? More than three weeks ago? I can’t _imagine_ going that long without a full night’s sleep. It’s like torture.” Glancing up again, she caught sight of both Chris _and_ Ashley looking at her from the rearview. Sam was suddenly _positive_ she had said something she shouldn’t have.

For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out _what_.

Their gazes were gone a second later, and she tried her darnedest to convince herself it was just another case of not being completely fluent in their friend-language. Maybe it hadn’t meant _anything_.

But God, if that was the case, why was her stomach so full of knots?

That was all it took to break through her hesitation, making herself look busy by typing another flurry of messages to Josh, hoping against hope that _maybe_ that would be the end of the conversation until they reached Ashley’s place.

Josh  
  
Hey again sorry for being annoying  
The three of us are heading over to Ashs for the night  
Were at my dads place right now so I can pack but well be heading over soon  
Were just gonna bum around in pjs so no pressure or anything  
Hope youre okay :\  


The three of them worked like a well-oiled machine, in and out of the Giddings house in a matter of minutes, in and out of the Hartley house as soon as they could slip away from Mrs. Hartley’s hugging, and dragging overstuffed bags up the stairs to the Brown apartment shortly after.

“God, I wish your complex had elevators.” Chris adjusted the strap of the pack slung across his shoulder, leaning against the railing as he mimed being out of breath.

Rumming around in her messenger bag for her keys, Ashley scoffed. “Complain about it more. Maybe it’ll help.”

At the sound of voices, a loud, low growling came from the other side of the door, rumbling menacingly.

When neither of the others reacted, Sam raised her eyebrows. “Uh…we’re just…not going to mention the snarling, huh? Just gonna…let that be a thing?”

Leaning in confidentially, Chris cupped a hand between his mouth and her ear. “Guard dog,” he said somberly, giving Sam a slow nod.

“Guard dog,” she repeated.

“Oh shoot! I totally forgot to ask if you were allergic!” Ashley looked over her shoulder as she slid the key into the lock, expression pained. “I can—oh shush,” she said, turning back to the door. The growling stopped just long enough for her to push the door open.

Sam was not allergic to dogs, nor was she typically _afraid_ of dogs; she considered herself something of a dog-person, really, but the timbre of the growling made her uneasy. In her head, she could already picture the stern German shepherd, or the slick rottie, or the drooling pittie…so when the door opened and Ashley was greeted by an obese pug wearing a bright green harness, there was, understandably, a moment of confusion. She blinked at the dog’s wrinkled face before turning back to Chris. “ _Guard dog_.”

“He. Is. _Vicious_.”

Ashley groaned, taking the first tentative step into the apartment, trying to shoo him away from the door so the others could get in. “The apartment has size limits for dogs, so…he’s…the best we could do. Charlie, please, just…move.”

“Don’t you talk to Charles like that.” Chris followed after her, bending down to scoop the chubby dog up off the ground. “ _Oof_. Man, you _gotta_ lay off the bacon, pal,” he muttered, squinching his face up as he was immediately attacked by slobbering licks. “See? What did I tell you? _Vicious_.” He angled himself so that Sam could get a better look.

“Are guard dogs supposed to wag their tails that hard?” Sam asked, smiling widely as she rubbed the pug’s floppy ears. “ _Hellooo_. Oh my God, he’s so wrinkly.”

Chris pivoted, pulling Charlie away from her. “Watch it. He’s _sensitive_.”

“You’re _not_ allergic, are you Sam?” Having hung her bag up on the back of a chair, Ashley joined them, obviously worried. “I could put him in another room, and—”

“ _No_ ,” she laughed, making a point to pet him again. “However…I have been _dreaming_ about my pajamas since I got out of them this morning, so if you could tell me where your bathroom is, so I could change, that would be _splendid_.”

Any memory of the strange conversation in Chris’s car was wiped from her mind as she slipped into her sweatpants.

***

**7:45pm**

The Browns’ apartment was small, cozy, and decorated mostly in warm maroons and creams. In the living area, a large window let in the fading light of sunset, a cool breeze, and the ambient sounds of a nearby street. It was, in a word, perfect.

None of them had actually fallen asleep, per se, but they had all come very close. On the floor, Ashley had curled up under a thick, impressively ornate crocheted afghan (the sort, Sam couldn’t help but notice, that the Hartleys’ couches had been decorated with), making her way through an equally thick, impressively old paperback novel. Close by, Chris lounged in an overstuffed armchair, tapping at his phone screen, the lenses of his glasses reflecting a flashing pattern of images as he switched between the same three phone apps over and over again. Sam had claimed the couch for herself, the chubby pug curled up at her feet while she fell into the meditative comfort of the apartment’s quiet noises.

Had the day not been such a monstrous affair, the silence might’ve been called _‘comfortable.’_

Charlie lifted his head from his paws, his harness giving a little jingle. Sam opened her eyes in time to watch Ashley jump out of her skin when an insistent knock came from the front door.

“Jiminy _Christmas_ …” she swore, pressing a hand to the base of her throat and shooting Chris a sour look. “Oh, ha ha, real funny.”

“Just for once, Ash, for _once_ …could you just say the fuck-word like a normal person? Maybe?”

Rolling her eyes, Ashley headed for the door and disappeared out of Sam’s line of view. Aware that she wasn’t going to find her center again so easily, Sam sat up with a groggy yawn. She checked her phone, more out of habit than anything else, trying to blink away the bleariness in her eyes. From behind her, there was a buzz of low voices at the door, and she was suddenly very awake. She stood before Chris could ask her what was up, and when Ashley reappeared, no longer alone, Sam was the first to throw her arms around Josh and pull him into a spine-cracking hug.

“Aw shit—glad to see I made the right call, putting on sweatpants before heading over here. This is a legit sleepover situation, huh?” Josh hugged Sam back, playfully leaning to and fro until he had the both of them swaying side-to-side like middle schoolers at a dance. “Did I miss out on boy talk and mani-pedis? Gonna be super bummed if I did.”

“You _definitely_ missed mani-pedis, but you know we’d never start talking about cuties without you.” Heaving himself out of the chair, Chris crossed the room in a few steps, knocking knuckles with Josh upon realizing Sam wasn’t about to move. “Glad you made it, man."

Josh shrugged with a low laugh. “Oh, you know me, couldn’t pass on the opportunity to be the life of _this_ party.”

“You want something to drink?” Ashley asked. “We’d been talking about ordering a pizza, but then we all sort of just…turned into lumps for a couple hours, I guess.”

“Oh fuck, I totally forgot about that. Let’s do that. Here, I’ll call.”

“No cheese on Sam’s—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve been paying attention, Ash.” Waving her off, Chris pulled out his phone and disappeared into the hall, away from everyone’s talking.

“Drink?” she asked Josh again, doing her best to not draw attention to how hard she was trying to read the scene in front of her.

A shadow of his usual grin appeared as he glanced towards the kitchenette. “Uh…sure. Any chance you guys got a beer or two in there? Or has Jamie gone full Wine Mom?”

“I can check, but you might have to settle for hard lemonade.”

“Ah yes. The drink of champions.” Once Ashley had made her way to the fridge, Josh looked down at Sam, raising his eyebrows. “Y’okay there, Sammy?”

She nodded before finally disconnecting, looking back up to him. “I’m fine,” she said in such a way that made him think she was not. “Just got a little worried when you went all radio silence on us.”

“I won’t do it again. Scout’s honor.” He flashed her a laughably botched Boy Scout salute before reaching over and taking the bottle Ashley offered him. “Hard lemonade it is, then. Excellent.” Twisting the cap off, he dropped himself into the couch divot Sam had been dozing in, shooting Charlie a sidelong glance. “Charles,” he said with a respectful nod in the pug’s direction.

Chris reappeared a moment later, seeming to consider his earlier spot on the armchair before filling the open spot on the couch. “Pizza in forty-five,” he reported. “I said I’d pick it up—so someone remind me.”

“As if you’d forget pizza.”

There was a tiny wave of chuckling at that, and then, just as quickly, the apartment fell into one of the most awkward silences in all of recorded human history. It was obvious on their faces that they were _all_ feeling it, helpless to fight against the wave of skin-crawling discomfort that came with not knowing what to say next.

As was so often the case, Josh was the one to stomp it into the ground. He took a long drink from the bottle, eyes scanning the room contemplatively before he cleared his throat. “Okay, so. Uh, I will be the first to acknowledge that shit’s an itty bitty bit weird right now, and I have done…very little to help that. I’ll go ahead and address the elephant in the room, since I guess I brought that dusty fucker in with me. No, I do _not_ want to talk about today, I’d _really_ rather not have any deep, involved conversations about emotions, and instead, I’d appreciate it if everyone sort of pretended today didn’t happen, and we’re all just chilling out for no reason in particular.” He set his drink down on the floor in front of him, resting his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward. “Anyone take issue with that?”

“Nope,” Chris said, lowering his eyes from Josh to Charlie.

“Works for me,” Ashley agreed, dropping herself back onto the wadded up blanket on the floor, setting her book aside for the time being.

“I think that sounds like an excellent plan,” Sam nodded, feeling fifty pounds of dread lift from her chest as they came to the agreement. She sat down on the ground between Ashley and Josh, stretching her legs out languidly. “That _does_ mean we have to find a way to fill forty-five minutes, though.”

“We could have that orgy everyone’s been talking about.”

“Uh, my mom _specifically_ said no orgies in the apartment while she’s out on business.”

“ _Fuck_.”

“We could always play that game you guys showed me,” Sam suggested with another poorly restrained yawn. “The one with the phones. And the _Twilight_ picture.”

Beside her, Ashley’s eyes went wide. She whipped her head to Sam with a look of horrified disbelief. “You saw the _Twilight_ picture?” Her gaze flicked to the couch, fixing both Chris and Josh with a frantic stare. “She’s seen the _Twilight_ picture?!”

Josh shrugged and reached down to get his drink again. “It’s a good picture.”

“It’s _not!_ ” she whimpered, falling backwards onto the floor. She spread her arms out wide and groaned up to the ceiling.

“Well, while she does…whatever she’s doing down there...Social Suicide it is! You kids remember the rules?” Without missing a beat, Josh removed his phone from his pocket and tossed it onto the patch of carpet between all four of them.

“I was born knowing the rules.” Chris’s phone was next, clattering on top of Josh’s. “Who goes first? We going oldest to youngest? Tallest to shortest? Hottest to nottest?”

Sam added her phone, and then took Ashley’s and added it, too. “None of those are fair.”

“Why’s that?”

She held a hand out, gesturing vaguely to Josh. “Oldest. Tallest.”

“And _hottest_ ,” Josh finished for her. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I will _happily_ go first.”

“It’s probably better that way. Just tear off the band-aid.” Grunting with effort, Ashley pushed herself upright once more.

“So no one’s gonna contest that Josh is the hottest?” Leaning back against the couch, Chris cocked an eyebrow and folded his arms. “ _No one?_ Really? I see how it is.”

He struck a pose, resting his chin on top of his fist as he stared dreamily into the distance. “You’re just jealous of my natural sex appeal. _Okay!_ Hmm…let’s see. Well, Cochise, since you have such _strong_ opinions about my raw animal magnetism. You’re up, buddy boy.”

“Bring it.”

Josh narrowed his eyes, tapping his index finger against the bottle. The corners of his mouth turned up into something familiar and disconcerting. “Mk, let’s start off easy, shall we?” He nodded his chin towards Ashley. “Swap shirts for the rest of the night.”

“Man, come _on_.”

Sam was already trying not to laugh, but the look on Ashley’s face threatened to push her over the edge. “I don’t think that’s going to _work_.”

“What? Because of Cochise’s dad bod? Ah, it’ll be fine. That shirt’s big on you anyway, Ash.”

“Excuse me? _Excuse me?_ Did you just say I have a _dad bod?_ ” Chris didn’t just turn to look at Josh—he pivoted his entire body to round on him. “Dude! The fuck! I don’t have a dad bod!” He glowered at Josh and then plaintively turned to the girls. “I don’t fucking have a dad bod.” His brow furrowed in concern. “Fuck. _Do_ I have a dad bod?”

Ashley opened her mouth to respond, but thought better of it, holding her hands up uncertainly instead. Sam, on the other hand, _erupted_ into giggles before seesawing her hand back and forth as if to say ‘kinda-sorta.’

“Oh _fuck_ you guys!”

“You’re a very sexy dad, Cochise. You’re also looking at this the wrong way—this is the perfect excuse for you to get people to call you Daddy. Don’t you want that?”

“ _NO?_ ”

“Aw, unfortunate. Now change shirts or give me your phone.”

Looking back to Ashley, Chris grimaced. “Fine, whatever. You okay with that?”

“I think I’ll live,” she sighed, getting to her feet and disappearing around a corner. “Sam, any chance you could like…help facilitate, here?”

“I will make the swap.” She shook her head at the idiocy of the whole thing, waiting until Ashley’s arm appeared from around the bend, shirt in hand. Sam took it, flung it over to Chris, and then deftly caught his flannel as he balled it up and lobbed it at her. “For you, madam,” she joked, handing it to Ashley.

“Fucking…stupid…” Chris muttered as he tugged her shirt on, clearly displeased when it was, in fact, just small enough to drive Josh’s point home. “I hate this game. This isn’t even my _house_ ,” he sighed, waving his hand to the Ravenclaw crest now across his chest.

When Ashley came around the corner again, she was rolling up the sleeves of the shirt. “I don’t see what the big deal is, I’m _perfectly_ comfortable.”

“My turn. I _deserve_ it. Sam. I’m going to present you with one of the most important questions of our time. Truly, this has been used as one of the most formative, important, and polarizing assessments of one’s relationships and allegiances, so…do you think you’re ready?”

Sam met Chris’s gaze levelly. “I am, but I have to be honest with you, it is… _very_ difficult to take you seriously in that shirt.”

Deliberately, Chris lifted three fingers as he spoke. “Fuck. Marry. Kill.”

“Who?”

He spread his arms wide, encompassing the circle of them all.

“Oh, that’s _mean_.”

Josh leaned farther forward, “No, no. I’m suddenly very interested.”

Chris grinned widely, clearly very proud of himself. “Or you could chicken out…”

Rolling her eyes, Sam blew a raspberry in his direction. “Do I have to go in that order?”

“Absolutely you do.”

There was no good way out of that one. She looked around the room, pretending to consider each of the other three carefully. “Okay, well…these may be controversial opinions I’m voicing here, but…Fuck Ash, firstly.”

A chorus of ‘ _What’_ s filled the room, startling Charlie badly enough that he hopped off the couch and padded into the kitchen.

Immediately bright red, Ashley dropped her face into her hands, giggling uncontrollably. “Oh my God— _really?_ ”

Sam was unfazed, turning her appraising gaze back to the guys. “Marry…well, let’s be real here, only one of you comes from a rich family, so…gonna have to marry Josh, I think. Finally realize my dream of being a trophy wife.”

He punched the air in victory, taking the opportunity to stick his tongue out at Chris. “Suck on _that_ , Hartley.” Turning back to Sam, Josh lowered his tone, “As your husband, I promise I will _never_ keep you from your secondary dream of fucking Ashley.”

“Oh my _God!_ ”

“So that just leaves…Kill…” Sam squinted in mock seriousness as she locked eyes with Chris.

In response, Chris narrowed his eyes, scooting towards the edge of the couch to get closer to her. “You would kill me? You would… _kill_ me, Samantha? If faced with the option, of sleeping with me, joining me in holy matrimony, or killing me, you would _kill_ me?”

“I’m definitely not going to fuck you, sooo…”

He flopped back onto the couch cushions and made a noise that was difficult to describe. “I need better friends. Friends who _appreciate_ me.”

“And are willing to bang your dad bod,” Josh added, narrowly dodging out of the way of Chris’s fist.

Rocking her head side to side, Sam clucked her tongue and thought. “My turn, then?” She turned to Ashley, giving her a jokingly menacing once-over. “Ash.”

“Oh God.”

“Have you read _Fifty Shades of Grey?_ ”

At that, Ashley laughed aloud. “No. No I have not.”

“Um, related question!” Josh suddenly piped in, smiling wolfishly. “Have you read the _fanfiction_ it was _based on?_ ”

Ashley’s face remained impassive as she held his stare. “No follow-up questions. It’s in the _rules_.”

“Oh sweet Jesus above, you have.” All the slights against him forgotten, Chris’s mouth fell open in surprise. “You _have_ , haven’t you?!”

“No follow-up questions!”

“ _Ashley Brown!_ I’m surprised at you!”

“I answered and now it’s my turn!” She waved both of her hands in the air, signaling for the others to stop talking over her (not that it helped much). “Josh.”

“Yes, Your Nastiness?”

“Ugh. Read us the last five things you searched on your phone.”

If possible, Josh’s grin only widened. “Man, you guys are so boring. Fine, gimme.” He reached down, fingers waggling, and Sam handed him his phone from the pile. “Last five, here we go: Tongue rash, world’s sexiest knock-knock jokes, how do I know if I’m allergic to strawberries, potato followed by onetwothree…seven question marks, and then octopus top hat.” Shrugging, he dropped his phone like one might drop a mic after a particularly sick burn. “Bam.”

Sam winced noticeably. “You know, if you have a tongue rash after eating strawberries, you’re…probably allergic to strawberries.”

“I never said the two were connected, just that I searched them. My turn again. So, Ash. Smashley. Encyclopedia Brown. Tell me. _Have_ you read the fanfiction that _Fifty Shades_ was based on?”

She flopped back onto the floor, covering her face with her hands. For a long while, she said nothing. There was a dramatic whoosh as she took in a deep breath, and then, almost too quietly to be heard. “Yes.”

The room _exploded_.

“It was _bad!_ ” she said, trying in vain to defend herself. “It was so _bad_ and I didn’t _enjoy it!!!_ I just…wanted to know what the fuss was about!”

“Why were you out there reading _Twilight_ fanfiction?!”

“ _NO FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS!”_ She paused, and then sat up fast enough to give herself whiplash, staring at Sam intently. “My turn. Sam, why do you know it was _Twilight_ fanfiction?”

“Ohoho!” Chris laughed, clapping his hands together at the drama of it all. “Plot twist of the century!"

“Catfight!” Josh added unhelpfully.

Sam sputtered for a second, taken off-guard by the immediate turnaround. Her mouth moved wordlessly in protest, but there was no use. She dropped her hands to her sides in a show of surrender. “I read part of it too— _part of it!_ One of my friends sent it to me, and—oh shut up, you goons, like you haven’t done worse.”

“I have not gone out into the great expanse of the internet to read steamy Edward Cullen porn, no.”

“My turn again. Ash.” Both girls laughed as Chris and Josh jeered from the couch. “Why don’t you like the dark, huh?”

To her credit, Ashley kept her smile even as she reached over to the pile of phones and presented hers to Sam. It was a slighter smile, decidedly different than the one she’d been wearing only moments ago, but a smile nonetheless. The boys booed in disappointment.

Instantly, Sam felt bad, lifting her eyebrows in regret. “I didn’t—”

But Ashley just waved at her. “Hey, no one else has forfeit yet. We were due for one. Go on, do your worst.”

“There’s never anything good on Ash’s phone anyway,” Josh wistfully sighed, taking a drink before offering it to Chris.

Sam shot her an apologetic look anyway. Much like the last time she’d played, she couldn’t help but feel like she’d stepped into forbidden territory without knowing it. At first, she didn’t quite know what to do with Ashley’s phone (she gave heavy thought to changing Chris’s contact name to ‘Chris _Heart_ ley,’ knowing that its subtlety would make it harder to notice and fix, but that felt like a cop-out). And then she made the fortuitous decision to check out her notepad. Sam opened one of the more recent entries, eyes scanning it quickly. A smile slowly crept across her face as she highlighted and copied the text, opening up the group text and pasting it in.

Only a moment later, the three phones still in the pile all flashed with a new message.

Everyone went perfectly still.

Staring at the pile, Ashley apprehensively asked, “What did you do?”

With an innocent smile, Sam set the phone back down among the others. “I just sent a text, that’s all.” She sniffed and pulled at a corner of the blanket Ashley was sitting on, using it to cover up her chilly feet. “Oh!” she added, acting as though the thought had only then occurred to her. “By the way, Ash, I had no idea you wrote.”

Two things happened at once: Ashley’s face went white, and both of the guys nearly collapsed onto the floor in their rush to grab their phones.

Josh managed to get his text open first, his face brightening and brightening until it seemed he might burst with childlike glee. “ _Ahhh!_ Oh fuck me _sideways!_ ”

Chris cleared his throat obnoxiously and began to read in a pretentious (and terrible) British accent. “ _‘And in that moment, she knew she was lost to her own insatiable needs: For answers, yes, but also for closure. When she’d arrived in the moors amid the smell of gunsmoke and blood—’_ ”

“Dude, fast forward to the interesting shit, huh? Like this part.” Josh, much to everyone’s chagrin, picked up the horrible accent as he read. “ _‘The world had grown dizzyingly warm around them, and she thought she might faint, were it not for the strength of his arms around her waist—’_ ”

Ashley dragged her fingers down her cheeks, making tiny sounds caught somewhere between sobs and laughs. “I hate you guys—I _hate_ you guys. And Josh, you’re so full of bullcrap, I didn’t write _any_ of that!”

He held up a finger to silence her. “ _‘Her breath caught in her chest, and her buttocks heaved with a great passion.’_ ”

“Her _buttocks_ _heaved?_ ” The shame was out of Ashley’s voice, replaced by exhausted disbelief. “I think you mean ‘ _bosom.’_ ”

“Nope, I’m reading what’s on the screen, and the screen says ‘ _buttocks._ ’”

“Butt cheeks can’t _heave_ , Josh.”

“Eat enough Chipotle and _anything_ is possible.”

“Gross. I’ve had like fifteen turns, can I just…give my next one to someone else?” She jokingly shoved Sam away when she tried to lean against her. “Josh, you go. God knows you won’t shut up, might as well put that energy to use.”

He snickered and set his phone down again, bowing as best he could from his reclined position. “I’d be honored to take your turn. And just so you know, I _will_ be reading all of that tonight, and I _will_ be offering editorial feedback.”

“I’d _really_ rather that you didn’t do any of that.”

“Tough. But hmm…do I have something? Do I…have an idea…Yeah, no, I got one. Samantha.”

“It never ends…” she joked, turning away from Ashley and fluttering her eyelashes as she looked back to the couch.

“Grab your phone.”

Sam quirked an eyebrow. “Well this seems counterintuitive…I thought this was the _punishment,_ huh?” Still, she did it, waving it jokingly in his face as she took it from the pile. “What now?”

“Pull up your voicemail, call up the last person who left you a message, put ‘em on speaker, and just have a nice little chat. You can pick the topic of conversation, of _course_ —I’m not a _monster_ , after all.” Josh chuckled, raising his drink as though toasting before taking a sip.

Clucking her tongue, Sam grabbed her phone from off of the table, opening up her phone app. She tapped the voicemail button and immediately felt the inside of her throat turn to ice. Her face must’ve changed, at least in some small way, because to her left, Ashley was suddenly speaking up.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she muttered through grit teeth, and Sam wondered distantly if Ashley thought she wouldn’t notice her saying it if she kept her lips from moving. “Josh, _seriously_. Sam, why don’t you—”

“Sammy’s a big girl, Ash, she can make her own decisions.”

Ashley turned to Chris instead, widening her eyes to try and communicate _something_. He looked from her to Sam, clearly puzzled, turning his hands over as if to say ‘ _What?_ ’

Sam only barely noticed them. Wordlessly, she hit the “Call Back” button on her most recent voicemail before putting it on speaker. Acting more out of habit than anything else, she tapped the volume button on the side of the phone until the ringing seemed to fill the entire room. She held the phone delicately before her, screen up, receiver facing her lips, as she’d done thousands of times before.

“Ugh. For real? You’re gonna luck out and have it go to voicemail? Well isn’t this a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation.” Josh leaned further back in the couch, drumming his fingers against the cushion nearest him.

Beside Sam, Ashley folded her hands together, looking to be in prayer. She set her chin between her thumbs and forefingers, squeezing her eyes shut. It was then that Chris managed to piece it together: she was bracing for impact. He only had to wonder why for a fraction of a second before the other shoe fell. “Oh, _fuck_ ,” he managed to say before the speaker clicked and a prerecorded voice rang out.

“ _Hey! You’ve reached Hannah! Sorry I missed your call, but if you leave me a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks! Bye!”_

In the absolute silence of the room, the beep that followed was shriller than anything the four of them had ever heard before. No one knew where to look—Ashley kept her eyes closed tight, Chris pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, Josh’s gaze went unfocused as his grin melted into something else entirely. It was only Sam who didn’t flinch, still looking straight forward out the apartment’s window. Surprising herself as much as everyone else, she opened her mouth, and she spoke.

“Hey Han.” She paused, feeling the corners of her mouth twitch unpleasantly. “Been thinking about you and Beth a lot. Today, especially. I hope, uh…I hope you’re okay, wherever you are. I hope you’re…together. And I hope…” Her throat went tight. She shook her head, about to hang up, when she felt a warm hand close over hers.

There was no resistance from Sam as Chris took the phone, exhaling a deep, steadying breath through his nose. “We miss you guys,” he added, voice steadier than it had any right to be. “A whole lot, actually.”

Muscles numb with equal parts anxiety and dread, Ashley forced one of her arms out, offering her open palm. The weight of the phone was like a brick in her hand. “We’re so sorry, Hannah. We’re just so, _so_ sorry.” Eyes still shut, she held the phone back out to the air between them all, waiting for someone else to take it.

Josh stared down at it as one might stare down the barrel of a gun. He swallowed hard, making no move to take it from Ashley’s hand. “Love you guys,” he said, voice dry and cracked and so very unlike how he usually sounded.

Quiet fell between them once more. In the middle of their circle, Hannah’s voicemail clicked as it timed out, automatically ending the call. The screen of Sam’s phone fell dark in Ashley’s hand. Slowly, Sam took it from her, holding it almost reverently.

No one said anything for a long while. They stared down at their feet, tongues too heavy and hearts too thick, all uncomfortable and all reeling from the emotional whiplash of the moment.

“I should uh…probably go grab the pizza.” Chris eased himself back up onto his feet, stepping over Charlie, who seemed intent on following him out.

“I’ll come with,” Ashley added, just a bit too quickly. She stood, grabbing her hoodie from off the back of one of the kitchen chairs, slipping it on and quickly sliding her feet into her shoes. “It’ll be easier if I’m there to unlock the door.” She mumbled it in a rush, adding an explanation where it wasn’t needed, pocketing the house keys.

Looking back over to where Josh and Sam still sat, Chris offered them a weak half-wave. “We’ll be back in a sec.”

“Sounds good,” Sam said, voice distant.

“We’ll be here,” Josh said, eyes distant.

The door clicked shut behind them, followed a moment later by the sound of the lock being turned.

It was difficult to say how much time passed like that. The room seemed to vibrate with the echo of Hannah’s voice, made all the louder now by its absence.

Absolutely at a loss for what to do, Sam covered her face with her hands, dropped them into her lap, covered her face again, and then settled on raking her fingers through her hair. She tugged the elastic out, sending her hair tumbling down from its ponytail. With movements much too jittery for her own liking, she set about gathering it all up again, twisting it into a messy nub at the back of her head. “Well shit,” she said, voice taut with what was either discomfort or incredulity. “Shit.”

“Shit,” Josh agreed. In one gulp, he finished what was left of his drink, rubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Fuck. I should’ve—ugh. God _damn_ it. Sam—”

She shook her head with a snap of her elastic, getting to her feet. “I should’ve just passed. That was…stupid. Wow. _Wow_ that was stupid. Shit.”

Josh’s expression was hard to read as he stood, walking into the kitchenette and opening a cabinet, dropping the bottle into a recycling bin with the sort of confidence that suggested he was in his own home. “No, me _asking_ was stupid. More than stupid, actually. It was—”

“I’m really, _really_ awful at that game, huh?”

Josh turned to her, not understanding. He searched her face for a moment but found no answers there. “Uh…you’re literally the best at it. How’d you mean you’re awful?

Scoffing, Sam sat down in one of the dining area’s high-backed chairs. She gave her phone a hard flick and sent it spinning in wobbling circles atop the table. “When _you guys_ are playing, you get each other to do _anything_. Or answer anything. And it’s no big. But when I’m answering something, or when it’s my _turn_ , it’s like…that stops. I _consistently_ mess up that flow.”

“Oh my God. Sammy, I—you really don’t understand the rules, do you? The _point_ is to get people to hand over their phone so you can fuck with them! That’s legit the point. That’s the goal. I would _love_ to get my grubby mitts all over Cochise’s phone, are you shitting me? Do you have the idea what kind of damage I could do? It is a fucking _dream_ of mine. Ash never lets _anyone_ read her shit, and you? You gave us that beautiful, beautiful gift.” He dropped himself into the chair across the table from her, plunking his elbows down so he could better lean in towards her.

They were both very aware of how quickly the topic had changed.

“I just feel like…I keep bringing up _exactly_ the stuff no one wants to talk about, you know? Like last time, with the whole Chris and Ash thing, and now—”

“Here’s the problem, Sammy. You wanna know the problem? Here’s the problem.” Josh leaned in further, raising an eyebrow as he spoke. “You came in on Season 3, okay? You turn on the tv, and all you know is like…Dany’s got some sick dragons, a bunch of people are about to get married, and also Jaime’s only got one hand. This is _all_ the info you’ve got to work with, because you didn’t see the shit that came before it—you _missed_ Seasons 1 and 2. You have no idea what’s happened up until that point. _Why_ does Dany have dragons? Has Jaime _always_ only had one arm? Who are all these frilly assholes? Why is everyone constantly fucking? I mean just… _constantly_ fucking? Hell, you never even _met_ Ned or Drogo. You’re missing… _huge_ , key pieces of context to understand what’s happening. Doesn’t mean you’re _bad at it_ , doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be watching. Just means you’re a little behind. But you’ll catch up.”

Glancing up from her phone, Sam offered him a humoring smile.

The corners of his mouth tightened. “Oh, Sammy,” he began, voice full of grief. “Please…please tell me you watch _Game of Thrones_.” When she didn’t respond, he let his head _thunk_ onto the tabletop. “ _Samantha._ ”

“There’s a lot of violence, and—”

“ _This_ is an act of violence. An act of violence against _me_.”

Her shoulders shook with what might’ve been a chuckle. “I appreciate the metaphor, at least.”

“Okay, how about this. New season starts this week. You got some time to bone up before then. You want I should give you a run-down of everything that’s happened up ‘til this point?”

At that, she really _did_ laugh. “I absolutely do _not_ want that.”

“Okay, but are you _sure?_ ”

“Prettttty sure.”

The silence that fell that time around was slightly less horrendous, but no less weighty. Josh seemed to notice this, and again, took it upon himself to quash it before it could grow. “Also, about before—”

Sam’s eyes flit back up to him.

“No. _No_. Not _that_ ‘before.’ I think I specifically said that emotion-talk is _strictly_ off-limits tonight.” He sliced his hand through the air to drive the point home. “I _meant_ you talking about the questions you think you fucked up so brutally on. Firstly. None of us know why Ash is such a chickenshit when it comes to the dark, leading me to believe there are two possibilities: One, she was once attacked by an actual vampire in the dead of night, or two, the more likely option, she doesn’t _have_ a reason. Either way, I’m pretty sure you’re good.” He popped his eyebrows up and down before swiveling to glance towards the front door. “Now, as for the Chris and Ash thing, I do believe I know what’s up with that.”

“Yeah, I remember you saying that,” she snickered, setting her cheek against her hand. “You sure you should be talking about this? I mean, what’s to stop me from spilling the beans and tattling on you as soon as they get back?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m letting you marry me for my family’s money, and you’re gonna do me dirty like that? Is that what I’m hearing? Yeah, thought I forgot about _that_ , huh?” Laughing, he continued, “Consider this me trying to help you fast forward to the current season, yeah? The short version of the story is that those two dumdums aren’t together because they’re both _idiots_ , but I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume you’ve already cottoned to that idea. The _longer_ version is that they both have this…stupid, ridiculous, frankly _unrealistic_ idea that romance actually happens like in Hallmark movies, and so they set these… _moronic_ expectations.”

Sam furrowed her brow, still smiling. “Not sure I get you.”

“You don’t _get_ me because it’s _stupid_. I—okay, look. Here, I’ll make it simple. They have… _no_ idea how real-world flirting occurs. None. You think either of them understands the fine art of wooing?”

“ _Wooing_.”

“They don’t _see_ their own bullshit as clearly being romantic. ‘ _Oh gee, all friends stare dreamily at each other from across the room, don’t they? Whoops, there we go again,_ accidentally _sitting too close together and getting snuggly. I mean, everyone falls asleep talking on the phone with their buddies about their hopes and dreams at three am, right?’_ ” He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “You know what those fuckers want?” Sam only shrugged in response, so he soldiered on. “Significant. Hand. Touches.”

Sam blinked. “I…genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do. Imagine any like, overtly romantic scene in a movie. Think about, I don’t know. _Titanic._ The roguish hero holds his hand out, and the wispy heroine apprehensively reaches out to take it. Or their hands brush against each other, and then slowly—so _fucking slowly_ —they end up holding hands. They want to do that stupid finger thing—”

One of Sam’s eyebrows shot up.

“Oh come on. You know what I mean. They want to do…that thing? With the fingers?”  
  
Her second eyebrow went up.

“No, not—okay, first off, wow. Usually it’s _me_ being accused of having my mind in the gutter. No, Little Miss Perv, I meant the…here, put your hands up like this?” He held both of his hands up in front of him, elbows on the table, palms facing her, almost as though he was going for a double high five. When she didn’t immediately move to copy him, Josh heaved a dramatic sigh and clucked his tongue noisily. “Sammy, I’m _trying_ to make a point here.”

Not without reservations, she mirrored his position, holding her hands up and out in front of her.

“ _Thank you._ ” Before she could ask what he was doing, Josh moved his hands forward, making a grand production of lacing his fingers between hers, punctuating the action with a squeeze.

Sam looked down at their hands and nodded. “I gotcha. The finger thing.”

“The _finger_ thing!” Josh grinned his usual grin. “So, trust me. I’ve been dealing with those two mooks since…well, pretty much since _ever_. Suffice it to say, my dear Sammy, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell either of them makes a move any time soon. They’re just gonna keep waiting for some big, dramatic moment, or like…some emotional and tear-filled confession. Expecting anything else is just gonna be like banging your head against a door over and over again, cuz believe you me, they’ve got _no_ idea how to identify actual, factual, twenty-first century flirting. They’re doomed,” he sighed. “So fuckin’ doomed.”

She remembered a conversation they’d had in the lodge a lifetime ago, not so different from this one. Back then, she’d thought Josh’s mockery had been full of endearment—fondness. At that moment, she realized she wasn’t too sure about that anymore. But it had been a long day, a strange day, and a bad day, so she let it drop from her mind. “Uh huh? And tell me, Josh,” she began, “What _does_ actual, factual, twenty-first century flirting look like to you?”

“Gee, you know Sammy…I _wonder_.” Pointedly, Josh glanced down to their hands, fingers still laced. His expression changed, becoming strange. “…do you think Chris realizes he’s wearing that shirt out in public?”

“Oh God.”

***

**Sunday, March 30, 2014  
2:03am **

Ashley inhaled deeply as she was pulled back to consciousness, the bright colors of her dream already beginning to fade. She yawned, cracking her eyes open just enough to try and make sense of what was going on. Save for the flickering light of the tv (playing what _appeared_ to be an infomercial for some kind of mop), the room was dark. If she really tried, she could still make out Sam sprawled across the overstuffed armchair, Charlie curled up on her lap, both quietly snoring. She laughed to herself, readjusting her own position to be more comfortable on the couch. Her hand patted around under the blanket to try and find the remote, planning on just turning the tv off and sleeping for real, but her fingers froze before she had any success.

“So…”

“So?”

“How’s…stuff?”

“Oh, stuff? Stuff’s fine. Stuff’s _great_ , actually—stuff’s never been better, now that you mention it. Peachy keen.”

She did her best to blink away the heavy haze of sleep, the gears in her head cranking away to piece together what was going on. It was only then that she realized the guys were unaccounted for in the room. Her first foggy thought was that they’d already turned in for the night, but that wasn’t right— _they_ were the ones who were supposed to crash on the pull-out couch. Another quick look around the apartment, and she noticed the balcony door’s lock was undone.

_That_ was what woke her, she realized as she woke up a little more: the click of the door being opened and shut.

“I’m being serious, dude.”

“Oh, I know, I’m being serious too, can’t you tell? Got my serious face on and everything.”

The window was still open from earlier. None of them had thought to close it before they’d hunkered down for the night. From her position slumped low in the couch, Ashley could only barely see _someone’s_ silhouette on the balcony, but since neither of them had turned on the outside light, it was nearly impossible to figure out _whose_. But she could _hear_ them. She could hear them crystal-clear, as a matter of fact.

She nestled herself back down against the cushions, fingers weaving absently through the wide spaces between its crocheted stitches. Part of her wanted to get up and join them, to go outside and lean against the balcony’s railing, to try and find some sort of normalcy amid the swirling shitstorm they’d been wading through for the past few months. How many times had the three of them done that? How often had they just…sat out there while the rest of the complex slept, telling stupid stories in hushed whispers, snickering loud enough to worry that the neighbors would yell at them to shut up? Maybe with a snuck beer or two. Almost _always_ with pizza or fries that had long-since gone cold and mushy.

Tonight wasn’t one of those nights. Tonight, she could already hear the helpless exasperation in Chris’s voice and felt her skin crawl at the terse replies Josh was shooting back. She’d put herself in the middle of too many of _those_ conversations, as of late. So she closed her eyes, pretended to be asleep, and listened.

“We missed you earlier. At the restaurant.”

“Mhm, yeah, well, I’m really sorry I missed out on half-priced apps and everyone giving me the sad-eye, but y’know. I had other shit on my mind.”

“That’s not—I just _meant_ that—”

“I know what you meant, Cochise. You’re not a difficult guy to understand.”

The first real tendrils of dread started to work their way up between her ribs, reawakening her stomach and heart with sick flutters. Ashley decided it was for the best that she had chosen to stay where she was. If she’d been out there, her emotions would’ve been too difficult to rein in. Her pokerface was shit.

Chris sighed, and then everything was quiet for what felt like an eternity. It was an old song-and-dance for them—a choreographed waltz through a minefield. Ashley realized she almost knew what Chris was about to say, moments before he actually said it.

“You know you can talk to me about this shit, right? _Whenever_. And _anything_.”

“Much appreciated, man.”

Another long pause, and she could all but see Chris mentally scrolling through dialogue options as if playing some shitty RPG. When he spoke next, it was his _tone_ that surprised her more than anything else. He sounded…well, honestly, she wasn’t sure _how_ he sounded. She wasn’t sure she’d _ever_ heard Chris’s voice take on that flat of an edge.

“Sam said you haven’t been sleeping.”

She couldn’t see Josh’s face, but if she had been able to, she thought he’d likely be every inch as surprised as she was.

“Yeah. Well. That was…nice of her to share with the class.”

“She’s _concerned_.”

“Mhm.”

“Just like the rest of us are _concerned_.”

“’kay.”

“Look, I get…I get if you don’t want to talk tonight, okay? I do. For real, it was a _long_ day.”

“Oh gee whiz, was it? I didn’t even notice.”

“I can let it drop tonight if that’s what you want. I don’t want to make shit _worse_ , but like. Come _on_ , man. Come _on_. You can’t keep just like…pretending nothing’s wrong whenever I mention it, but then suddenly _I’m_ the villain when I’m _not_ all about it. I just want to _help_ , Josh, for fuck’s sake dude. I’ve been here the whole time, just… _trying_ , and then I find out you’ve been talking to _Sam_ about all of this? I can’t get a _word_ out of you, you’re not answering my texts, but _Sam_ —”

“Hey, here’s an idea. Stop right there.”

She hadn’t recognized Chris’s tone, but Josh’s she knew. An unpleasant shiver ran its way across her skin, causing her fingers to involuntarily clench around the blanket. That tone was a red flag, a warning sign flashing bright against the backs of her eyelids. If there was one thing the Brown women were good at— _excelled_ at, really—it was identifying those flags. Identifying and avoiding.

There was a pause in their conversation, filled only by the sound of rustling fabric as one or both (assumedly) turned to the window to ensure the girls weren’t watching them. Voice lowered to a murmur, Chris continued, “I said I’d drop it.”

Silence.

The nasty tendrils of anxiety thickened around her guts, turning into slimy eldritch abominations that lashed at her ribs and filled her mouth with the sour taste of desperation. She could’ve seen this coming from a mile away, but it didn’t make her reaction any less intense. She wanted to scream. She wanted to insert herself directly between the two of them out there on the balcony and act as some sort of meat shield. She wanted to throw up. Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut tighter.

Just like that, the memories of the three of them joking around and swatting at mosquitos under the balcony’s lamp felt impossibly distant. Even as she tried to recall them, the images seemed to wear and fray at the edges like old sun-stained photographs.

Ah, great.

Now she wanted to _cry_ , too.

Josh still hadn’t responded, as far as she could tell, and she had to really strain to hear what Chris said next.

“Hey, are you…like…have you been…?”

_That_ got an answer from Josh. “If you are even _contemplating_ asking me the question I _think_ you are, Cochise, then I’m gonna have to go ahead and strongly suggest you _reconsider_.”

There was another beat of silence from Chris’s end, and Ashley furrowed her brow as she tried desperately to fill in the blanks. “ _Are_ you?” he finally asked, doing _nothing_ to help her piece together this particular puzzle.

She didn’t have too much time to think about it, as the balcony door swung open a second later. Though she couldn’t see it, she could hear Charlie hop back onto the ground, letting out a shrill, surprised yelp; at least she didn’t have to worry that the guys would notice her jump at the sound of the door. There was a confused rumble of voices then, and she pretended to be roused from her sleep, reaching up to rub at her face with her sleeve.

In the armchair, Sam was slowly sitting up, her hair tousled and eyes bleary. “Whuzzat?” she muttered, only barely loud enough for Ashley to hear.

Josh’s silhouette was only visible as he crossed the tv’s bright screen. “I’m taking Ash’s bed,” he said entirely unprompted, gone again a moment later.

Charlie stood at the threshold of the balcony door, the little curlicue of his tail wagging expectantly, suggesting Chris was still out there. Whatever had just gone on was over, but something uncomfortable hung in the air like static electricity.

Shivering, Ashley crawled to the other end of the couch and clicked the lamp on. She made a show of wincing against the light on the off-chance anyone else was watching her.

“That bed is gonna be _full_ of farts by tomorrow, hope you know that,” Sam laughed, her voice thick with sleep. There was a pained noise when she checked her phone and saw the time. “Aw man, didn’t think I’d actually fall asleep like that…I can already feel my neck screaming at me, geez.”

It was only reluctantly that Ashley looked away from the balcony door and back towards Sam. “Yeah, ooh, not really the comfiest chair to nap in. I know that one…” She hummed a tiny sound that was meant to be a laugh but didn’t really come close. “Well, if he’s crashing in my room, you can take my mom’s bed, here, I’ll—”

“I really don’t want to impose—”

Ashley waved it off as she got up, carefully stepping over the blanket that had pooled around her feet. “Don’t worry about it, seriously, she’s totally fine with it. Do you want me to find you a new pillow or…?”

Sam shook her head blearily, clearly still half-asleep. “I got it. Are you gonna…” she paused, voice trailing off. She looked at Ashley thoughtfully, then the balcony door, then middle-space, running sleepy calculations in her head. Her eyes narrowed with a question she didn’t ask aloud, just watching Ashley’s face instead.

“I’m…going to figure out where I’m sleeping.” She averted her eyes just as the first prickles of heat crept into the tips of her ears. “So…don’t be shocked if I pop in there with you in a minute or two.”

“And don’t be shocked…if you _don’t_.”

She shrugged. “Either way.”

“Either way. I gotcha, Ash.” Smiling that soft, drowsy smile, she playfully patted Ashley’s shoulder. “G’night.”

“Goodnight.” And then, before she could think too heavily on it, she pulled Sam into a tight hug. She could feel the moment of surprise, and then Sam was hugging her back just as tightly. Maybe even _more_. She closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against Sam’s shoulder.

For one surreal instant, it was almost like they were back in the guest room, both tear-streaked and huddled under the Washington’s scratchy blankets. It had been such a _long_ day. They were both unspeakably exhausted from grappling with their thoughts (the ones they shared and the ones unique to them), both made vulnerable and earnest by the late hour.

Sam let go first, heaving a breath that caused her shoulders to rock. “What a day, huh?” There was a tremor to her voice that, while tiny, said a whole lot.

“Hardest day we’ll ever have to do,” Ashley said, the conversation she’d had with Chris in the parking lot coming back to her in vivid detail. “And we’ll never, ever have to do it again.”

It looked for a moment as if Sam wanted to say something in return. The moment passed. She nodded, then raised a hand in a half-hearted wave as she took her leave, disappearing into the master bedroom and leaving Ashley alone in front of the tv.

In the light, it was easier to find the remote. She turned the tv off just as an overexcited salesman began listing off all the uses for what looked like a Koosh ball made out of sponge. Ashley made short work of the room, coolly and methodically picking up the blanket and tossing it onto the armchair, moving snack bowls and drinks into the kitchen, and toeing aside anything in the way of the foldout couch. She had just finished removing the couch’s cushions when she heard Charlie scamper away from the balcony and into the kitchen behind her.

“Hey, I got that, don’t—”

“What, you think I can’t do it myself?” She offered Chris a sidelong glance, quirking an eyebrow jokingly. “ _I_ got it.”

“Yeah, well, can’t blame a guy for trying to be chivalrous.”

“Oh, is _that_ what that is?” Once unfolded, she set about making the bed, grabbing the set of spare sheets from the laundry nook. She pursed her lips as she battled with what to say next, trying not to let her apprehension show. “Oh, Josh changed his mind and called dibs on my bed, so…”

Chris let himself drop onto the mattress with a grunt, but didn’t offer any further response.

A wave of exhaustion crashed over her. Ashley sat herself down on the edge of the bed, feet tucked primly against one of its supports on the ground. In that moment, it was difficult to believe that it had only been _hours_ since they’d been sitting in the parking lot outside the funeral home—she was sure she’d aged at _least_ five years in that time. Just barely turning over her shoulder, she put what little energy she had left into feigning nonchalance. “You doing okay?”

The mattress dipped and squeaked when Chris rolled onto his back. “It’s been…a _long_ fucking day.” He slid his glasses off and tossed them none-too-gently onto the side table before covering his face with his hands.

“I’ll say.” She reached over and turned the lamp off again, the streetlamps outside giving the room only the faintest silvery cast of illumination. Each and every one of her muscles seemed to creak and groan as she finally laid herself down, staring up at the ceiling while trying to get comfortable on the spare pillow. “But we got through it.”

“Mhm.”

“And we never have to do it again.”

There was a muted sigh, and then the rustling of sheets as Chris dropped his hands from his face. “I really, _really_ hope not.” More rustling.

Ashley stretched her arms out over her head with a yawn that Chris caught immediately. “ _Are_ you okay, though?” she tried again. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you dodging the question.”

“You know I’m shit at dodging. Ever see me in gym?”

“Can’t say I ever had that particular pleasure.”

“Well trust me. It was a bad time.” A stretch of silence fell between them, punctuated by Charlie’s wheezy snorts as he attempted to hop up onto the bed with them. “I’m…tired,” he answered finally. “Just crazy tired.”

She sighed, scooping Charlie up off the ground and setting him down between them where he promptly curled up and snuffled contently. “Yeah, I feel like I’ve been awake for like…”

“ _Eighty four years_ ,” Chris said, giving his voice a strange, wavery affectation as he said it.

“ _Something_ like that.”

A door slammed somewhere downstairs. There were footsteps, heavy and angry, stomping down the stairs, voices murmuring with unintelligible agitation. It was the sort of thing Ashley was used to, but there was a rustle from next to her as Chris turned onto his side and grabbed his glasses. She couldn’t tell what he was looking at until he spoke up again. “We leave that open all night?”

Under the cover of the darkness, she grimaced. “What?” She pretended to spot the cracked window for the first time. “Oh, that? I guess. It gets so hot in here with more than a few people hanging around.”

Chris was quiet again, but she could all but hear the whir of his thoughts. “Could you guys hear us earlier? On the balcony?” His voice had lowered to a conspiratorial whisper, reawakening the maelstrom of anxiety in her chest.

Ashley was good at a great many things.

Lying? Not one of them.

Not by a long shot.

She tugged the sheets back up to her chin, doing her best to appear as uninterested as possible. “What do you mean? I heard the door open and Charlie barking…?” At the sound of his name, the pug lifted his head and snuffled at her side, setting his head on top of her shoulder. Yawning, she added, “Josh really just like… _threw_ the door open, huh? Such a gentleman.” Now it was _her_ dodging the question, and God, she hoped he didn’t notice.

Thankfully ( _blessedly_ ), Chris seemed content enough to let it go. “Yeah…” he began, obviously distracted. “Uh, is the plan…that you’re crashing... _here?_ Or…?”

Shit. Now she almost _wished_ they were talking about her eavesdropping. “Oh, I mean. I figured, I mean…Josh took _my_ bed—"

“Right, yeah, I mean, it’s fine, I just—”

“And I kinda just thought Sam…I mean she was pretty upset, and like. She probably could use the privacy, I thought—”

“Sure, that makes sense, yeah. It’s totally chill, just wanted to _check_ —”

“I mean…why, is it weird?” Ashley cringed outwardly, hoping Chris wasn’t looking right at her. She was bright enough to know that asking if something was weird automatically made it ten times weirder than it needed to be. She had brought it upon herself. She had weirdened the situation. It was officially weird. Suddenly, she was _painfully_ aware of the fact that she was still wearing his shirt.

“No—no! It’s just…not how we usually bunk up. That’s all.” It very well could’ve been her imagination, but Ashley swore she could actually _hear_ Chris swallow before speaking again. “Uh…you said Sam was upset?” he asked, the change in topic as relief inducing as aloe on a sunburn.

Ashley leapt on _that_ particular opportunity. “A little…It’s just been such—”

“A long day,” Chris finished for her. “Yeah. Sure has. If today had a tagline, that would be it.”

She sighed, scratching Charlie’s ear before draping an arm over her eyes. “I thought we were doing _such_ a good job cheering her and Josh up…We were actually having _fun_ , and like, _laughing_ …” The old full-body cringe came over her again. “And then that stupid game.”

A low groan escaped him. “I know—God, I _know_.”

“Like… _geez Louise_ , Chris, that was just…”

“Bad,” he finished again. “That was unbelievably bad. At least _you_ tried to stop it…I should’ve figured out what was happening _way_ faster than that. Ugh. Not just that, either. Of _all_ of us, you’d think _Josh_ would’ve…” his voice trailed off in the dark, the sentiment hanging in the air.

_Known better_ , Ashley thought, _Josh should’ve known better_. But she didn’t say it. As it turned out, she had bigger things to worry about. Her nose and eyes were prickling with the first hot warnings of tears. The weight of the day had finally settled itself down on her chest, crouched there like some horrible monster, threatening to crack her ribs and collapse her lungs. It was _everything_ : the memorial service, the restaurant, the stupid fucking game, the conversation she wished she hadn’t heard…

The silence of the room had taken on a slightly different tone, and it was only after another moment that Ashley was struck with the singular sensation she’d missed something. “Huh?”

“I _said_ …how are _you_ doing?”

Her tongue was thick in her mouth when she tried to answer. “I’m fine. Tired. Same as you.”

A beat. “Are you crying?” There was concern in his voice, but something else too, something like low-grade panic.

It just made her clamp her arm tighter over her face. “ _No_ ,” Ashley insisted. Then, “ _Yes_. Ugh, I’m _always_ crying.” She tried to laugh, but it only came out as a weak huff of breath. “Just like. Constantly.”

“I think in the medical profession, they call that having ‘full eyes.’” Chris said it so seriously and so knowledgeably, that for a moment, she almost believed him.

And then she _did_ manage a laugh, lifting her arm only enough to throw him an incredulous look through wet lashes. “ _Full eyes?_ ”

“Mhm,” he nodded somberly. “As in, ‘I’m sorry Miss Brown, but the test results have come back and you do, in fact, have full eyes. They’re just… _full_ of tears.’”

“Oh my God.”

“No, unfortunately even God can’t help you now. I won’t lie to you, the prognosis is grim. You gotta empty those eyes, Miss Brown. Just gotta empty them out.”

She groaned, doing her best to keep her laughter muffled so as not to wake Josh or Sam. There was no lessening her big, cheesy grin, though. “What if I don’t _want_ to empty them out?”

Chris seemed to think this over for a moment, rolling onto his stomach and propping himself up on his elbows. “There’s no delicate way for me to put this.”

“Just give it to me straight then, Doc.”

He nodded. “Have you ever put a marshmallow in the microwave?”

Ashley let her arm drop entirely as she turned to openly stare at him. “They’ll _explode_ ,” she said flatly, less a question and more an exasperated statement.

“Well no, first they get really, really, just… _abnormally_ huge. _Then_ they explode.” Putting both hands up to his own eyes, Chris quickly flared his fingers, punctuating the move with a pop of his lips. “It’s the sad truth behind full eyes.”

“The silent killer.”

“Oh no, it’s not silent at all. It’s actually _very_ loud, and _very_ painful.” It was getting harder for Ashley to muffle her giggling, then, but he kept going. “And it doesn’t _kill_ you—you can lead a perfectly happy, healthy…well, okay, maybe just _healthy_ life after full eyes, Miss Brown. Also, just between you and me? It’s considered a pre-existing condition, so like. _Good luck_ getting decent insurance, that’s all I’m saying.”

A snort—a real, full snort—escaped her, startling Charlie again. Ashley flailed her arm over to jokingly smack Chris’s shoulder, only for her blow to be buffeted away. When she tried again, he pinned her hand down onto the mattress as though they’d been arm wrestling. She laughed and held her other hand up in surrender, resisting the urge to curl her fingers around Chris’s hand.

He didn’t immediately pull away, though, and that was a surprise. The bigger surprise came when he gave her fingers a firm, reassuring little squeeze. “Thanks for having my back today, Ash,” Chris said, voice lowered once more. “For real, I…don’t think I would’ve made it through on my own.”

Her laughter tapered off as she returned the squeeze, the moment leaving her feeling immensely better than she had only minutes ago. “Yeah you would’ve."

“Questionable. Very questionable.” He dropped himself back down onto the bed, removing his glasses with his free hand, sending them clattering to the side table for the second time that night.

Ashley closed her eyes, still perfectly aware of the weight of Chris’s hand in hers. “Tomorrow’s gonna be a better day.”

“It’s _gotta_ be, right?”

***

**10:35am**

“Seriously? You can’t just like…keep a bottle of something masculine around here _just in case?_ Do you know what I had to wash my hair with? Do you _know?_ ”

“Now, Cochise, is that any way to speak to our lovely hostess?” Josh’s feet had been up on one of the dining area’s chairs up until that moment; he shot Chris a jokingly indignant glare when they were swatted away so he could take the seat. “I, for one, have no issue smelling like a tropical paradise. Gotta get more secure in that masculinity, my good man.”

Chris flapped one of his hands like a sock puppet’s mouth before knocking the pizza box open and taking one of the remaining pieces. “Maybe I just don’t want to walk around smelling like peaches and honey.”

“You know, given that’s what _I_ use to wash my hair, I think maybe you should lay off,” Ashley warned, her voice a jingling sing-song as she rummaged around in the fridge.

Sam glanced up from her phone, offering him a noncommittal shrug. “Peaches are delicious. I can think of worse things to smell like.”

Ashley sat back down next to Sam, sliding Josh a bottle of water before cracking open a can of soda for herself. “ _Way_ worse,” she agreed, nodding fervently. She was mid-sip when she caught herself in a laugh, one hand rushing up to cover her mouth in case she spat. “Oh my _God_ , do you know what that just made me think of? Do you guys remember a few years back—uh, you guys’ senior year, I think it was—when Drew Moreau found that little…” she waved her hand as she tried to think of the word, holding her thumb and index finger about four or five inches apart. “The…I don’t know, canister of pepper spray on the floor in the Gov classroom? And he just… _sprayed_ it on himself?”

Josh slapped the table in appreciation, already cackling. “That moron—they had to evac like three other classes.”

“Is _that_ what happened?!” Sam sat upright, turning to Ashley with wide, disbelieving eyes. “For _real?_ ”

“Yeah! I was next door in History, and you’d’ve thought a _bomb_ went off, people were so freaked.” Ashley grabbed a piece of pizza as well, taking a bite before adding, “But who _does_ that? I heard the teachers talking about it, and there was no printing on the bottle, no label or anything, so who just like, _sees an unmarked spray can_ on the ground and thinks ‘Oh sweet, gonna spray this _right_ into my eyes’? Who?”

“I mean…apparently Drew Moreau,” Chris answered flatly.

“Probably not the worst decision that he ever made.” Looking off into the distance wistfully, Josh shook his head. “Dude always smelled so bad. _So_ bad. The kind of bad that you actually have to _try_ for, you get me?”

“It was _almost_ impressive.”

“Ew.”

“Honestly, the pepper spray was probably an improvement.”

“Well, I mean…that’s a fair point.”

Something in Sam’s head clicked into place. In an instant, she was awash in the juddering feeling of déjà vu, resisting the urge to shudder it away. “Hey, so…I’ve got a weird question for you guys.” She said it before she could think herself out of it, tapping her fingers against the table.

Without looking up from his pizza, Chris shrugged. “I mean, we probably got some weird answers for you, so…”

“ _Probably?_ ” Josh scoffed.

She smiled uncertainly, but heaved a sigh and leveled her gaze at them. “You guys are going to think I’m nuts, but…okay, so, yesterday, at the restaurant, I heard Em and Jess…uh, say something.”

Josh crossed his fingers on both hands, screwing his face up in concentration. “ _Please let it be about Mike’s dick, please let it be about Mike’s dick, please let it be about Mike’s dick_ …”

Ashley stuck out her tongue. “Double ew.”

“No, not about Mike’s dick.” She pretended to ignore Josh’s disappointed groan. “Does the word ‘almosts’ mean something to any of you?” she asked, looking around the table with an apprehensive half-smile. It only took a second for her to realize that asking had been a mistake after all. It was a very stupid question.

Folding his arms on the table, Chris leaned in closer. “Y’know what? It actually _does_ mean something! See, ‘almost’ is an advent—”

“Ad _verb_ ,” Ashley corrected from over the rim of her can.

“That’s what I said—an adverb that you use when something, mmm…isn’t _quite_ one way. Or it’s _nearly_ one way. It’s—”

She rolled her eyes hard enough to almost (or, as Chris had suggested, _very nearly_ ) make herself dizzy. “Oh! Oh really? Wow, thank you. You’ve been incredibly helpful. No, you putz, you know what I meant. Like is it…slang for something? Or like a nickname? Or…?”

It was Josh’s turn to fix her with a look, one eyebrow raised appraisingly. “A nickname. Yeah. _Yeah_ Sammy. What a great nickname. ‘Hey there, my dear almost! How is it going, my man? Perchance, did you finish the homework last night?’”

Without missing a beat, Chris beamed, “‘Ohoho, well, _almost!_ ’”

“I hate you guys,” Sam said, raking her fingers through her hair. “With every fiber of my being, I hate you so much.”

Snickering, Josh nudged Chris with his elbow. “Nah. It doesn’t mean shit to me. Clearly Cochise has opinions about it—bad ones, mind you, but opinions…how ‘bout you, Ash?”

She shook her head, shrugging her shoulders weakly. “Nope. No clue.” Her eyes narrowed slightly, the implications of the question finally catching up to her. “Wait… _why_ would you think it meant something to us?”

In her head, Sam weighed her next words carefully. Though she couldn’t figure out why, though none of the _others_ seemed to know why, it still felt chancy—like using a term you’d seen on the internet without checking Urban Dictionary first. Emily and Jessica hadn’t exactly been using it in the nicest of ways, after all. Lips pursed into a strange, apprehensive shape, Sam told them. “I heard them, uh…using it to talk about us.”

The confusion on their faces was cartoonish in its intensity. After a beat, the bag of chips on Josh’s lap crinkled and he shoved another handful into his mouth. “I mean…honestly, it’s better than what I assume they _usually_ call us.”

Chris snorted a laugh. “Speak for yourself, they think I’m _awesome_.”

“ _Mmm_ …” the other three hummed in unison, creating a chorus of doubt.

“Nice. In unrelated news, _all of you_ are uninvited from my birthday party this year.”

Ashley turned back to Sam, mouth set in a hard line as she thought. “Are you… _sure_? Not that you heard it, I’m sure you heard it, but like, that they were _referring_ to us?”

“Positive. I am _positive_.”

“But…” Clearly, she wasn’t understanding, the corners of her eyes crinkling, “ _How_ , though? What were they saying?”

Sam shook her head uncertainly. “They were talking about spending the day with _‘the almosts.’_ ” She shrugged, looking between the three of them. “And it’s…it’s not the first time I’ve heard them do it, either.”

Josh and Chris exchanged a glance that she couldn’t quite read. “Oh no?” Chris looked back to Sam, still wearing an expression that suggested he was waiting for the punch line.

She gnawed at her bottom lip, again _very_ aware of her words. “Yeah, they, uh…they were saying it up at the lodge, too.” Suddenly, her napkin was the most interesting thing she’d ever laid eyes on; she stared down at it intently. “When they were…” _Setting up the prank_. “…hanging out by themselves.”

“The _fuck?_ ” Josh leaned far enough back in his chair that Ashley startled, reaching a hand to grab for him in case he was falling. “ _The almosts?_ What a _weird_ fucking thing to call someone. Why not the nerds? Or the dorks? Or the losers? Or the—”

“Hey, hey. We get it, bro. We’re not cool, we _know_.”

“ _Sam’s_ cool,” Ashley pointed out.

“Sam’s _vegan_.”

“Uh, Sam’s _right here_.” There was no fighting her laughter, though. Sam looked back up from her napkin and shrugged for what felt like the millionth time. “Hey, I got no answers for you guys. I’m just telling you what I heard. I’m _just_ as confused.”

Josh had taken to rocking back and forth slightly on the back legs of his chair, absently chewing at the inside of his cheek. “Nonono, I can’t deal with this. It doesn’t make sense. Like there’s no clear _meaning_ —what makes us _almosts?_ ”

“Maybe it means we’re _almost_ worth hanging out with,” Ashley offered, voice glum. “They’ll come to the parties at your house, but good luck sitting at lunch with them…”

Chris turned to her, “Is high school drama getting you down, Ash?”

“Oh, blow it out your nose.”

“No, no, I get it—it’s hard being the misunderstood brainy girl. Have you considered taking off your glasses and straightening your hair?”

“I don’t _wear_ glasses, and my hair _is_ straight.”

“Aw shit. That’s really all I had in the way of advice.”

Ignoring the Peanut Gallery, Josh grimaced in thought. “Almost. Almost, almost, almost. What the hell are the four of us _almost?_ Hot?”

“ _Wow_.” Sam folded her arms across her chest. “Cold as _ice_ , there, Josh.”

He waved his hand dismissively. “ _Obviously_ I meant as a _whole_. Like the four of us, combined, the group is _almost_ hot. You and me, Sammy? We got that shit down pat. But those two?” he jerked a thumb in Chris and Ashley’s direction. “ _Please_.”

“We can _hear you_.”

“I _know_ you can, Ash. I’m trying to drop a _hint_ , here. Pale, nerd-looking mofos—looking like Napoleon Dynamite and Deb, over here, while Sammy and I are bringing the _heat_.”

There were not words enough in the English language to express precisely _how_ withering the look Ashley gave him was.

Sam threw her hat into the ring as well. “Maybe it means we’re _almost_ impossible to deal with for more than three minutes at a time?”

“Oh, I like that,” Josh nodded. “That might be it, actually.”

“Almost…” Chris narrowed his eyes in thought, “Almost…old enough to rent an SUV?” He looked back up, feeling the heat of three sets of eyes burning through him. “What?”  
  
Brow furrowed and mouth slightly agape, Sam blinked a couple of times. “Yeah, _that’s_ gotta be it, Chris. Thank you, as always, for your valuable input.”  
  
“Well I mean, if you wanna split hairs, I’m pretty sure we can _all_ rent SUVs in like…” His face contorted with concentration again. “Saskatchewan? I might be making that up. But I don’t think I am.”  
  
“You are just a font of wisdom, you know that?” Still, she was laughing again, rolling her eyes. It was _uncanny_ how Chris had that ability.  
  
He puffed his chest out and comically brushed a piece of imaginary lint off of his shoulder. “Just call me Comic Sans, I guess.” Chris snickered until he realized the others were staring at him again. “Like… _font_ of wisdom? _Font?_ I—oh come on, that was hilarious!”  
  
Sam turned to Josh, her eyebrows drawn up in a pantomime of despair.  
  
“You will, in fact, get used to it,” he said simply, chuckling to himself. “It just…takes some time. Give it a little longer.”  
  
“No, you don’t get used to it,” Ashley interrupted, tone flat but still playful, somehow. “You just kind of learn to _tolerate_ it.”  
  
“Oh _fuck_ you guys!” Feigning insult, Chris let his voice crack. “ _I_ know I’m funny, and that’s all that matters.”  
  
Josh thumped him on the back before reaching around to grab his bottle of water. “Sure you are, Cochise—sure, sure."

“Man, don’t touch me. You just compared me to Napoleon Dynamite—I’m not talking to you.”

“Do something about the glasses and the hair and the nose and the whack-ass sense of style, and maybe I’ll apologize.”

“ _Gosh!_ ”

“Oh!” Sam giggled, “Maybe that’s it—almost _funny_.”

“If that’s it, I’m gonna sue the tight, tight pants off of them. I’m fucking _hi-_ larious, and I won’t have my brand slandered like that,” Josh smirked.  
  
“The almosts…” Ashley said again, pursing her lips as she turned to look out of the window. Her eyes caught a bright flash of color as a singular butterfly alighted on one of the balcony’s planters. Some unimportant voice in the back of her head rankled at that. It felt too early in the year for butterflies to be showing up. “It’s just…do you think they’re making fun of us, somehow?” Her expression seemed to darken for a second, but it wasn’t with her patented brand of Ash Anger™ that the guys loved joking about. Instead, the crease between her eyebrows seemed full of worry—maybe even sadness.  
  
“Do I think that _Jessica Riley_ and _Emily Davis,_ the reigning bitches of BitchTown, capital of Bitchopia, of the planet Bitchicus Prime, are _making fun of us somehow?_ ” Chris enunciated each word with painstaking precision, eyebrows raised so high that they were in distinct danger of disappearing into his hairline. “Uh, yeah Ash, I think it’s a _pretty safe bet_ that it’s not a _compliment_.”  
  
She looked back to him, expression unamused and mouth open to respond, but was interrupted by Josh shoving another literal fistful of chips into his mouth. He crunched down on them loudly, shrugging dramatically, “I mean, again, it’s better than what we usually get called, right?” he asked, purposely showing the room as much of the contents of his mouth as humanly possible as he did so.  
  
“Well _I_ like it,” Sam said, causing the other three to look at her. “Eugh, close your mouth. But for real, it has a fun kinda ring, doesn’t it? It’s… _mysterious…_ ” She waved her fingers in the air and looked off into middle space as she repeated, “The Almosts.”  
  
There was a moment of (relative) quiet as they all stared and Josh continued to crunch. And then, nearly in unison, they all grinned.  
  
“The Almosts,” Chris agreed. “Capital T, capital A.”  
  
“Almost funny, almost hot…” Josh took a swig of his drink before laughing. “Almost—” he caught sight of Chris’s expectant smile and groaned. “Almost old enough to rent an SUV.” Chris waved him on to continue. “Except in Saskatchewan. Where we _might_ be old enough to rent SUVs.” Another wave. “Seriously, man? Can I—ugh. Where we _might_ be old enough to rent SUVs, but Chris isn’t _sure_ , so we shouldn’t take his word for it.” Chris gave him a thumbs-up and Josh smacked his hand away. “I take it back. If they’re making fun of us for not being funny, they should get that. They deserve it. We’ve only brought it upon ourselves.”

“I mean, you’re not wrong.”

Sleep had, quite miraculously, seemingly worked wonders on everyone’s mood. If there had been any lingering discomfort between them, hot showers and day-old refrigerated pizza had obliterated it. None of them addressed it, and it was likely that even if someone had _asked_ , they wouldn’t have had the words—but the fact of the matter was, yesterday was gone. It was dead, buried, and unseen, hidden somewhere deep underground and growing colder by the second. They’d gone to bed late, woken up late, made fun of each other’s ridiculous bed hair, almost as if they’d just had a normal, run-of-the-mill sleepover.

There was relief in that, like waking up after a particularly brutal cold to find you could breathe out of both nostrils again; there was some guilt in it, too, letting yesterday’s events spiral down the shower drain, but they did their best not to dwell. All they could do was cling to the normalcy life would let them have; or, at the very least, the moments that were _close_ to normal. _Almost_ normal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! Again, thanks so much for those of you who went through the trouble of finding this fic again! I'm super sorry for the inconvenience of moving, but I'm INCREDIBLY grateful for all of you! Happy New Year, and expect the next chapter soon! :P


	5. Where (too much is said)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand we're back in business! Thanks again for everyone who's stuck with me through my account-moving. I'm here to stay, folks, and this train just keeps chugging along.
> 
> An important note for this chapter (and the rest of the fic, really) before I get into the nitty-gritty of specific warnings. OBVIOUSLY, this is a work of fiction, meant for entertainment purposes, so please never take any of the advice (ESPECIALLY not the psychological or medical advice) that I include. I haven't seen Dr. Hill's degree, neither have you, so just say no. Related to this, since it's such an important part of the game (and therefore the fic!), please always talk to medical professionals before changing up any medications you might be on--it's so much better to be safe than sorry. Take care of yourselves, out there <3
> 
> Relevant warnings for this chapter: Body horror, blood and gore, discussions of mental illness, discussion of medication, questionable USE of medication, pretty much everything covered in the "Psychiatric report" clue from the game, so much texting. Just. A lot of texting.

**Wednesday, April 2, 2014  
Late**

Josh’s eyes burned with exhaustion, but he did his level best to keep it from showing. When Bob Washington was on the warpath, it was simply the wiser choice to grin and bear it, to refrain from interjecting or pulling faces that suggested complacency. His father was hardly a cruel man, but Josh’s temper had come from _somewhere_ , after all, and it certainly hadn’t been from his mother.

The lecture was familiar by that point: It was the one that started “Do you _know_ how much I’m paying to put you through school?” and usually ended with “Just finish the semester,” “You’re throwing your life away,” or, on the rare occasions where Bobert was feeling particularly jolly, “Your sisters wouldn’t have done _anything_ like this.” Real idyllic family shit. They were basically the Cleavers. Just then he was somewhere in the middle of the tirade, probably right around the spot where he started spouting the “This has been real hard on _all_ of us” bullshit, but Josh realized that he hadn’t actually heard most of what he’d been saying.

_Fuck_. There it was, ladies and gents, living proof of the dangers of insomnia. Behind his eyes, his thoughts were chugging along with a strange, staccato sort of rhythm, moving too quickly or not at all, rarely resting where he needed them to be. He made a point to lean a bit forward, to furrow his brow, to grit his jaw instead of gnawing on the string of his hoodie as he had been. It was no use…it was like trying to sit in a crowded lecture hall with a hangover. No matter how hard he tried, he could _not_ focus on what his dad was saying. He could make out the shapes his mouth was making, could judge how frustrated his tone was…hell, he could hear his mom humming to herself as she cleared the dinner table behind them, but for the _life_ of him, Josh couldn’t process what his dad was actually _saying_.

There was only one thing to do about it.

He took to the old standby of nodding every so often, occasionally muttering a low “Uh huh,” or “I know,” when it seemed most appropriate. It wouldn’t work for long (that much he knew from experience), but it was just so hard to devote his attention to anything other than how heavy his eyelids felt.

Everything else was too loud, like the very house was a nest full of buzzing hornets. The clinking of plates being stacked made the skin on the backs of his arms crawl, a sensation made all the worse by the cloyingly sweet song his mom half-sung as she set about cleaning way the remains of what they’d just eaten. And…shit. With no small amount of alarm, Josh realized he couldn’t even remember what that had _been_. They had _just_ finished dinner, hadn’t they? And still he couldn’t piece together whether it had been spaghetti or chicken or takeout or if they had photosynthesized like goddamn sunflowers.

God Almighty, he needed to _sleep_.

Bob’s voice continued to drone on in front of him. Josh was struck with a wholly inopportune thought that brought him to bite down on his tongue to keep from laughing (something vaguely along the lines of, _So THIS is how those_ Peanuts _kids felt_ ). Again, he tried to steel himself, tried to bring his attention fully to what was being said. And again, his thoughts were a soupy, tangled mess of non-sequiturs. Each time he tried to nail down what was going on, something unimportant and bizarre popped up. Why couldn’t he remember what they’d eaten? When the fuck had Melinda Washington ever _done the dishes?_ But the _weirdest_ part of it, the part that he was _incredibly_ hung up on, the part that genuinely made him worry for his own cognitive function, was the fact that no matter how hard he strained his brain, he couldn’t remember when his dad had gotten back home from filming. He kept running the dates in his head, and kept coming back to one truth: Bob _should’ve_ been at Washington Pictures in Burbank, working on _Blood Monastery 3_.

So why the _fuck_ was he sitting on the couch, yelling at him?

“ _Josh!_ ”

He snapped back to himself, blinking hard as he looked up at his father.

There was a vein throbbing in Bob’s temple, ugly and forked, made distressingly obvious by his receding hairline. “Have you heard a _word_ that I’ve said to you?”

Blinking again, Josh felt his mouth open. This wasn’t the sort of situation where a snappy comeback would be appreciated, he realized; the cogs in his head whirred as he tried to come up with a suitable answer. “Uh…” was all he managed.

Face reddening, Bob shook his head. “Unbelievable… _unbelievable!_ What are you doing over there, sleeping? Is _that_ it? Are you _sleeping?_ ”

“No, I…” he sputtered, a hot wave of shame washing over him as he felt his ears and neck begin to prickle with humiliation. For a moment, his mouth gaped open and shut like a fish gasping for breath, his words eluding him. There had to be some sort of explanation he could give…he was tired, it was hard to think, he’d been having really shitty nightmares that kept him from getting more than a few hours of sleep at a time, and _God_ , his mom’s humming was _so_ distracting…

In the gauzy vagueness of his thoughts, a puzzle piece clicked into place.

The entirety of his body broke out in goosebumps.

Josh leaned back in his seat, feeling it pressing insistently against his shoulder blades. He felt his forehead crease as he gave his father a fearful once-over. “What?” he asked, voice little more than a hoarse whisper. He cleared his throat and tried again, but the results were much the same. “What did you say?”

Bob went almost _purple_ with fury that time, hands balled into fists atop his knees. Each inch that Josh had pulled back, he leaned forward, closing the space between them again. “Are. You. _Sleeping?_ ”

Whatever color was left in his own face immediately drained. The room fell deadly silent around them, save for his mom’s melody, which, while distant, was suddenly all too recognizable. As she cleaned, she’d occasionally murmured a word or two to herself; it was only then, with Bob glaring daggers into him, that Josh realized he’d understood her all along.

“ _Hmm hmm hmm hmm…Frère Jacques…hmm hmm hmm…hmm hmm hmm…sonnez les matines…”_

He ached to turn and look at her, but felt his muscles paralyzed by the intensity of Bob’s stare. Josh shut his mouth with an audible _click_ of his teeth, his breathing beginning to grow labored as his chest constricted. His ribs had become fingers, articulating and clenching and squeezing the air from out of him until he thought he might pass out.

Bob opened his mouth (doubtlessly to launch into another lecture), face growing darker all the while. When he made to speak, no voice came from him—there was only a wet choking sound that wasn’t entirely unlike a cat trying to pass a hairball. This seemed to confuse Bob, who cleared his throat before trying again. Still no voice. The anger in his eyes flickered, then disappeared, giving way to something Josh couldn’t quite name. It was then that Bob’s chest heaved, once, twice, three times, and he folded over himself. He began to gag, making terrible, visceral retching sounds as his fingers scrabbled at his throat.

At the same time, he became aware of a meaty popping sound behind him, reminiscent of someone cracking out their joints. His mom had stopped humming.

Josh’s vision filled with glittering spots warning him that he was dangerously close to passing out. Squeezing his eyes shut as tightly as he could, he put all of his effort into pulling in as deep a breath as the invisible band around his chest would allow, the air filling his lungs in a shuddering gasp. It all rushed out of him in a shaky exhale a moment later, and though he had been so afraid that he wouldn’t be able to take in another breath, the tightness of his chest seemed to lessen then. He took another deep breath, trying to hold it for longer before it escaped him. He took another, then another, then another, until the world around him grew blissfully silent.

No more gagging, no more humming, no more cartilage tearing…just quiet.

He kept his face screwed up, feeling the racing thudding of his heart slowly beginning to even back out. Whatever had just happened, horrible as it had been, had been nothing more than a momentary lapse in…what? His rational thought? His perception? The human brain needed sleep (something he _clearly_ hadn’t been getting enough of), and wasn’t it…wasn’t it true that people could hallucinate if they were tired enough? If their brains hadn’t rested? That had been on an Abnormal Psych test recently, hadn’t it? Maybe last semester. If he _really_ tried, he could almost see the bullet points of the study guide explaining it all…

After another few moments like that, breathing in and out, he opened his eyes again, expecting to see his parents staring down at him, concerned but not completely surprised.

He did not, however, expect to see Bob still sitting on the couch, face the purple-black color of an old bruise, eyes bulging and mouth open wide. Josh had just enough time to process a single thought, childish in its disregard for the situation ( _Oh shit, just like_ The Ring), before he saw his father’s lower jaw begin to quiver.

“P-P-Pop?” His voice cracked as though he was fourteen again.

Bob’s jaw wagged up and down, his eyes rolling back until only the whites could be seen. His mouth opened wider.

And wider.

And _wider_ , until Josh could see the dark pits of Bob’s old silver fillings in his back molars. His tongue lolled out like a thick, slimy worm, revealing something _impossible_ behind it.

At first, Josh couldn’t figure out what he was seeing. There was something pale pushing past the ring of his father’s throat, too large, too solid to be vomit. When four thin, dainty fingers hooked themselves over the front of his chin, though, it became clear enough. There was blood underneath the perfectly manicured fingernails, staining them a crusty brown. They clenched, exerting some unseen pressure, and Bob Washington’s jaw seemed to drop to his chest. Had there not been an arm slithering its way out from between his teeth, the expression would’ve been a hilarious caricature of surprise.

There was another horrendous tearing sound as flesh gave way, Bob’s body falling to the carpeting. He wriggled there, his stomach pulsating grotesquely. An elbow appeared from inside of his mouth. Then a second set of fingers. A second hand. A second _arm._

The acrid taste of bile filled Josh’s mouth as he watched his father all but _deflate_ before him.

Beth wriggled free from the sack of skin that had once been their father like a butterfly bursting from out of a cocoon. All the while, she fixed her blank, hazy eyes on Josh, straightening up to her full height. Even as she took her first step out of him, her clothes streaked with wet, shining gore, the flesh on the ground continued to writhe, its shape warping and stretching until shuddering and going still.

He wanted to run, wanted to look away from the grisly scene in front of him, but Josh found he couldn’t so much as blink. His body was too heavy under the weight of Beth’s unseeing stare. There was nothing he could do but watch as she neared him, shedding their father’s skin and wiping blood from her face.

Beth’s mouth never moved, but the sound of her voice filled his head so suddenly and so loudly that it felt as though he’d been struck. _This is what you_ wanted _, isn’t it?_ Her shout was oozing accusation, thick enough to choke him. _Isnt it?!_

_No!_ Josh screamed—or maybe only _thought_ he screamed—pressing himself as far back against his chair as he could, wondering how and why he wasn’t tipping over. His feet, suddenly part of his body again, scrambled against the carpeting, thumping ineffectively as he tried desperately to put more space between the two of them.

She limped forward, each step unsteady, the muscles of her legs creaking audibly when she put her weight on them. It didn’t take long to reach him. Beth leaned into him, clamping her hands atop his on the chair’s armrests, and he could feel the clamminess of her skin, could see where frostbite had turned her lips black, could see the cataracts spreading across her eyes, could smell the sweet horror of _rot_ from inside her mouth. _It should’ve been_ you _, Josh. It should’ve been_ you _who died._

A second set of hands gripped his shoulders from behind, leaving dark, wet smears on the fabric of his hoodie, and he realized with a belated surge of terror that he hadn’t heard a peep from his mother.

The humming began anew, moist lips pressed so hard against Josh’s ear that he could feel the teeth hidden just beyond. _Frère Jacques, frère Jacques,_ Hannah sang discordantly to him, the shape of her mouth slurring the words in such a way that it almost sounded like she was saying his name.

Beth’s hands tightened over his, her nails digging deep rivets into his skin. Her fingers were so cold, so frozen by months of being buried under the snow, that his own hands had gone numb to the agony, but still he screamed until his throat felt raw. Behind him, Hannah’s hands slowly crept upwards and inwards, her fingers cradling his chin like a lover’s might. _Why didn’t you save us, Josh?_ Hannah or Beth or both asked, the sounds of their voices tangling into a wriggling mass somewhere behind his eyes. _It should’ve been you. God, it should’ve been_ you _._

With one fluid motion, so much stronger than either of them had any right to be, Beth shoved him and Hannah pulled him, finally tipping the chair over to send him hurtling to the floor. He fell, back slamming against the carpet. He sprung up and…

Realized he was in his bed.

He head whipped from one side to the other, taking in the shapes of his room in disconnected pieces. Bedside table. Lamp. Laundry hamper. Pile of clothes in the corner. Clock.

His breath came in short, panicked bursts, his heart pounding so hard that it felt like he was shaking his bed on its frame. Without meaning to, his hands found his face, balling up against his eyes to try and block out the lingering images the nightmare had tattooed on his eyelids. He couldn’t say how long he sat like that, head in his hands, subconsciously rocking forwards and back, muttering quiet platitudes to himself until his pulse slowed to something more normal.

Slowly, he dropped his hands again, groaning in disgust when they touched something cold and unpleasantly wet. The morning light illuminated the room just enough for him to notice how dark his sheets were. Cringing, Josh touched the t-shirt he’d fallen asleep in, finding it entirely soaked through. The realization had the strange effect of waking him fully—he noticed how wet his skin was, the dark outline of his own head stained on his pillow. He’d been sweating bullets. Sweating like a sinner in church. Like a fox in a forest fire. Like a politician trying to tell the truth. Like a drowned rat. A-fucking-lot.

He grimaced at the thought of stripping his bed and trundling down to the laundry room. The clock on his bedside table flickered as the time changed, catching his attention just long enough for the early hour to send another wave of exasperation wracking through him. Not even six in the morning, and he was already as awake as he’d ever been.

Fuck.

The worst of it—the absolute _worst_ —was that the nightmare was as fresh in his mind as it had been while he was asleep. None of it had faded, not the way his father’s throat had bulged, or the way Beth’s skin had been sloughing off, or the feeling of Hannah’s wet mouth against his ear…it was all still _there_ , as real and disgusting as the sweat cooling on his sheets.

“This has to stop.” He said it to himself, jumping at the sound of his own voice. His heart rate spiked again, then dropped again, proof positive that he was more adrenaline than man for the time being. “Fuck me _sideways_ …fuck this, fuck this, fuck this…” Josh scrubbed at his eyes knowing full well it wouldn’t help. It _never_ helped.

He looked to the clock a second time, squinting through the blurry veil of his exhaustion to check that he had the right of it. It was just so _early_. He could try and go back to sleep…but that didn’t seem likely. He could get up and wash his sheets like some embarrassed teenager…but that wasn’t particularly appealing. He could go down the hall and wake his mom…but again, crying about a bad dream to his mommy wasn’t a particularly appealing prospect. His eyes fell to his phone, lying facedown on the nightstand.

God alone knew how many times he’d woken Chris for stupider reasons (and vice versa, _obviously_ ). There’d been that stretch freshman year of high school where they’d both gotten accustomed to waking up to no less than ten messages from the other. So it wasn’t a _ridiculous_ thought to reach out.

But did he _want_ to talk to _Chris_ about this?

Josh stared at his phone, eyes burning in much the same way they had in his dream.

Would Chris even _care?_

He narrowed his eyes as he thought. The other night, on the balcony outside of Ashley’s apartment, it had sure _seemed_ like Chris wanted to help. But _did_ he? Did he _really?_ Did he really want to hear what Josh had to say about it all? About the nightmares? About the twins? About _everything?_

His phone was in his hand. He swiped to unlock it, opening up a familiar text thread. He typed quickly and messily, scowling at the smear of sweat he had to wipe off of the screen.

sammy  
  
wyd  
  
u up  
  


He let his phone rest on his lap as he made a more organized attempt at collecting himself, breathing deeply and raking his hands through his hair. Through the slats of his blinds, the sky was beginning to lighten, slate giving way to morning; the reality of the impending daylight made it that much harder for him to lie to himself about the situation. There was no fucking chance he was falling back asleep like that. No chance in Hell.

There was a buzz, and he picked his phone up, relieved at getting such a quick response.

sammy  
  
My answers to both questions completely depend on what your next message is  
Example  
If you were thinking of following that with  
Whatre you wearing  
Then what Im doing is sleeping and no I am not up  


Maybe Chris would’ve cared. But Josh wasn’t about to run that risk. There was _zero_ question in his mind about Sam, though. Sam _always_ cared. _  
_

sammy  
  
samantha  
  
sam  
  
sammy  
  
quite honestly im offended  
  
when i sext u plz believe it will be better than that  
  
When huh  
Interesting wording there Casanova  
meant what i said  
  
said what i meant  
  
but fyi i really was just wondering if u were up or not  
  
most people are passed the fuck out rn  
  
its like  
  
ass oclock in the morning  
  
dont get me wrong tho  
  
if u wanna tell me what youre wearing ill listen  
  
and ill be super attentive  
  
Some people get up at ass oclock to hit the gym before class  
every part of what u just said is horrible  
  
:P  
The real question is why are YOU up  


“That _is_ the question, isn’t it?” Josh sighed, finally swinging his legs over his bed and getting up. Sam knew the deal, more or less. He hadn’t gotten into the real nitty-gritty of the nightmares with her (if only because he didn’t want to burden her with the warped machinations a brain could cobble together after being fed a steady diet of horror movies for more than a decade), but she knew the basic idea behind them. The twins were gone. They hadn’t found them. They would never be coming home. He should’ve been looking out for them. He should’ve chased after them. He should’ve saved them. But he hadn’t, because he’d been passed the fuck out with his head in his arms, snoring away in a castle of Jeremiah Cragg bottles.

Sam got it. _God_ , Sam _got_ it. Sometimes talking to her about Hannah and Beth felt like having a conversation with himself—they’d been the two closest to the twins, the ones who knew them the best, the ones who missed them the _most_. Sam understood.

Chris?

Ash?

Not so much. _  
_

sammy  
  
like u said  
  
im hittin the gym  
  
gonna work on my delts AND my glutes i think  
  
hey quick question  
  
Mhm  
delts and glutes are actual things right  
  
They are actual things yes  
just testing u  
  
Riiiiiiiight  
nah more insomnia bs  
  
just wanted to like  
  
idk  
  


He groaned, thumbs hovering over the keyboard as he fought with himself. There was a fine, fine line between confiding and over-sharing. It was a line he found himself teetering on with shocking regularity when talking with Sam. He typed out an answer that wasn’t quite a lie, wasn’t quite the whole truth, before setting about yanking his sheets off the bed.

sammy  
  
just wanted to like  
  
idk  
  
double check that im not still dreaming  
  
if that makes sense  
  
i guess  
  
:( Sorry  
Youre definitely not still dreaming though  
yea i realize that  
  


Aaand just like that, it was time to reel it all back. Commiserating with Sam was all fine and good…right up to the moment where he felt himself on the brink of an actual emotional purge. Then it was all hands on deck, batten down the hatches, gird your loins and strengthen those defenses. He deflected the only way he knew how.

sammy  
  
if i was dreaming u wouldnt have reacted to my bootycall text w such disgust  
  
Oh please  
and if i was having a nightmare u wouldve answered w something cryptic and terrifying  
  
like  
  
i bought u some hummus  
  
>:(  
Im feeling less sympathetic towards you by the second you know  
or like  
  
let me tell u all the reasons why honey hurts bees  
  
or even  
  
i have this mushroom thing and i promise it tastes just like real meat  
  
Oh look at the time Im at the gym and I gotta go  
mhm  
  
go do ur sun salutes or w/e  
  
So close  
Still wrong  
But close  


That made him smile. Only slightly, of course…but it was a smile, nonetheless. Josh set his phone back down on the nightstand as he finished balling up his sheets, starting in on the arduous task of shucking the covers from his pillows. He’d managed to get both out before there was another mechanical buzz.

sammy  
  
Hey this is probably stupid but if it was the nightmares again I have a thing  
gurl u know im all about stupid things  
  
as it turns out i  
  
myself  
  
am a stupid thing  
  
If Ive come to know anything its definitely that  
But my dad always used to tell me that bad dreams happen because youre too hot  
well  
  
Har de har  
Flip your pillow to the cooler side and try to go back to sleep  
Or get rid of some of your blankets or sheets I guess but the pillow thing always helped me  
Impossible to have bad dreams on the cool side of the pillow  
And if you dont believe me then believe my dad  
Hes a medical professional  
Knows this stuff  
sounds legit  
  
ill give it a go  
  
if scott giddings rn says it works then its gotta right?  
  
:P  
Try and get some sleep okay  
After all it IS ass oclock in the morning  
so u DONT want me to work on defining my glutes or delts huh  
  
Your glutes and delts are fine  
Get some sleep  
samantha anne giddings  
  
did u just admit i have a nice butt  
  
oh god glutes ARE ur ass right  
  
im like 99% sure they are but  
  
that 1% man  
  
its haunting me  
  
Not my middle name  
Go sleep  
Ill be around after class if you want to talk later  
ok  
  
but im not gonna forget the butt thing  
  
were gonna talk about the butt thing  
  
Get some sleep Josh  
yeah yeah yeah  
  
loud and clear sammy  
  
gonna flip that pillow and take a snooze cruise  
  
and then  
  
later  
  
after i look up glutes on wikipedia  
  
we talk about the butt thing  
  
:T  


He sat back on the edge of his bed, staring at the crumpled pile of sheets at his feet. There’d be no more sleep, he knew, cool side of the pillow or not. It was a nice gesture, though. Sweet.

He’d tucked his phone away in the pocket of his sweatpants after signing off with Sam, but he became aware of its weight against his leg again. He could still reach out to Chris…maybe even Ashley. Or _both_ of them, like in the good old days. He _could_.

Instead, he squatted down and collected up the ball of sheets, absently humming to himself as he made his way down to the laundry room. He stopped immediately when he realized _what_ he was humming. That wasn’t good. No, that wasn’t good _at all_.

***

**Thursday, April 3, 2014  
2:07pm**

He’d been seeing Hill for the better part of the past four months, and while he had to admit he liked him better than he’d liked North or Williams, Josh still didn’t feel quite comfortable in his office.

At first, he’d thought it was a step up from North’s office, what with all her bright lights and watercolors hanging on the walls; hell, at first he’d thought Hill’s office was _cool_. The place had a real _Hannibal_ vibe to it: mahogany paneling, slick leather chairs with the weird divots, a weirdass Renaissance-era triptych taking up the better part of an entire wall, peculiar sculptures on the desk, and a huge south-facing window that let in _just_ enough sunlight. Hill had books and sleek filing cabinets and the sort of hardwood floors that always seemed to smell freshly varnished. _This_ , Josh remembered thinking to himself, _this right here is what a shrink’s office_ should _look like._

And yet…every time he sat himself down in the big ol’ chair in front of the desk, the only thing he felt was discomfort. Sure, there was a couch nearby that he could’ve used—and maybe he _should’ve_ —but it was always the chair. Josh was not a couch person. Couch people _needed_ the box of tissues, couch people _needed_ pillows around them. Chris and Ashley were couch people. Chair people, on the other hand, were just there to conduct some business before moving on to another of the day’s appointments. He and Sam…now there were some chair people, if ever there’d been any.

“So. You say things haven’t been going quite as you’d hoped.”

There was a dull _thunk_ as Josh set down what he’d taken to be some sort of hellhound carved out of driftwood. “Well that’s a contender for ‘Understatement of the Year.’” He fought the urge to roll his eyes, but felt them widen petulantly all the same. He kept his line of vision firmly on the weird, misshapen paperweight, feeling strangely like a child called into the principal’s office.

The floor didn’t creak under Hill as he slowly walked to the desk from the window. It _never_ creaked. It was firm and well tended and nothing like the floors in the lodge. The floors in the lodge _always_ creaked.

“I was of course talking about this past week, Josh, not the situation at large. During our last session, you had said this was going to be a trying week for you. I have to imagine that the memorial service for your sisters was an incredibly difficult event to get through. How do you feel you handled it?” Hill was an older man, maybe late fifties or early sixties, if Josh had to guess. What hair he had left was well on its way to fully grey, and his skin was showing the first signs of going doughy. Sometimes, Josh had to wonder if the office was part of some greater shtick he was running—Hill was _by no means_ Hannibal Lecter, but he dressed as though he wanted to be. The accent didn’t help, of course.

Josh sucked his teeth, making a low, frustrated _tsk_ sound. “I was really kinda hoping that this would _just_ be about the night terrors, actually. _Everything_ is an ‘incredibly difficult event to get through’ when you’re running off of forty-five minutes of sleep and an energy drink.” When he looked up to Hill and saw his face, it took all of his self-restraint not to deflate.

He knew _that_ look. He knew it with a detestable sort of intimacy. It was the look that a shrink got when they suspected they’d poked at a soft spot. A _juicy_ spot. The sort of spot that wouldn’t take a whole lot of wearing down before it bore fruit. North hadn’t gotten that look _too_ often (and it was _probably_ for that reason that he’d stuck with her for as long as he had), but _Williams_ sure had, and Purkiss, before her. Hill, on the other hand…Hill was like a bloodhound when it came to sniffing out things Josh wanted to avoid discussing. The logical part of his brain knew that it was that sort of ability that made a _good_ therapist; the emotional part of his brain just wanted him to back the fuck _off_.

All the same, it was Hill who let his eyes drop first. Across the desk, he crossed one leg over the other, the buttery leather of his loafers brightening as the sun touched it. He’d uncapped his pen, the ostentatious fountain kind, writing something in the notepad on his lap. “I’d imagine so,” he said after a time, letting his eyes flick back to Josh. “Sleep _is_ an incredibly important part of our mental processes, after all. Memory consolidation, waste removal, emotional processing…all things that our brains busy themselves with while we sleep. Necessary functions, too…now, you say you’ve been having night terrors, but I don’t think that’s…quite right. There are some key differences between night terrors and nigh—”

Josh shook his head with a quick, curt hand motion. “I took Psych 101. I know. ‘Night terror’ just sounds better than ‘nightmare,’ you know? Little kids have _nightmares_. What I’ve been having…” he grimaced before quickly covering it with a scowl. “Let’s just say, we’re _not_ dealing with little kid stuff.”

Hill offered him a quick smile as he folded his hands over the notepad. “I have _no_ doubt of that, Josh. After a serious trauma, sometimes our minds process things when we aren’t fully conscious. It’s easier for us that way, and—”

Again, he chopped the air with his hand, signaling an immediate stop to _that_ particular train of thought. “No. I mean. I don’t think this has anything to do with…” his lips tightened against his teeth. “…what happened to my sisters.” Just _saying_ it made him feel as though his insides had been scooped out with a knife. “It’s gotta be the meds, right? Like they’re not agreeing with me or something?”

The pen in Hill’s hand jiggled slightly as he mulled it over, bobbing his head from side to side. “It _is_ possible. Many antidepressants _can_ give you particularly vivid dreams or nightmares.”

“‘ _Vivid’_ is another contender for ‘Understatement of the Year,’ for what it’s worth.”

“So it _could_ very well be your medication.” Hill made the statement with a minute incline of his chin that suggested he very much doubted it. “What has the subject matter of these nightmares been? I know many people find it difficult to recount their dreams with any sort of specificity, but what would you say the general… _gist_ has been?”

Josh was silent.

Another mushy spot, it seemed. Or perhaps the same one.

Hill was the sort of person who didn’t mind silences, awkward or otherwise, so he didn’t appear to be in a rush to say anything else. He simply held his pen as he watched Josh, eyebrows lifting in passive interest. Somewhere in the office, a clock ticked.

It was a dirty trick. Silence had never been Josh’s friend, and shit, that went _double,_ these days. Each second that ticked away grated at him just a bit more, wearing on his resolve like sandpaper. “Most of them have been about the twins,” he intoned flatly, making every attempt to sound as detached from the admission as possible.

“I suspected as much…and in these nightmares, I take it that you _find_ them?”

He leveled his gaze at him from across the desk, leaning back in his seat to mirror Hill’s posture. _No,_ he thought to himself, _They find me._ But he couldn’t actually _say_ that. He couldn’t give _that_ to Hill. So instead, he forced a grimace of a smile and muttered, “Something like that.” Hill opened his mouth to respond, but Josh beat him to the punch, going so far as to push himself back from the desk. The legs of his chair screeched against the floor, effectively cutting him off. “I _really_ don’t want to talk about my sisters, okay? I get it—it’s the holy grail of emotional jackpots sitting there, _begging_ to be claimed—but I haven’t gotten a full night’s sleep in _weeks_ , and I am getting _unbelievably close_ to losing my shit _completely_. So. If we could…just…talk about… _that_ …”

When Hill got thoughtful—deeply, dreadfully _pensive_ —he had a way of moving his face that made Josh think of _Pirates of the Carribean_ ’s Davy Jones. Something about how flat his upper lip got, or how his cheeks stretched and shrank…or, more likely, the keen, hungry interest in his eyes. Really, all he was missing was the mottled skin and tentacles. “Loss is hard, Josh. The feelings that it dredges up can feel…insurmountable. Sometimes, these things can be a little scary…even terrifying…but I’m here to make sure that no matter how upsetting things may get…you’ll always find a way to work through it. You don’t have to be hesitant to discuss your sisters. There’s no judgment in this office, as I hope—”

“I _do_ talk about them, all right?” It came out harsher than he had intended, but something about what Hill said felt too much like an accusation. His teeth were on edge, the nape of his neck and tops of his arms prickling with indignation. “I just don’t want to _right now_. I just want to talk about this medication so I can get some _sleep_.”

Hill didn’t seem immediately offended by the outburst. Really, he never seemed offended by much of _anything_. He just continued tapping the tip of his pen to the pad, the corners of his mouth tightening and going slack as he thought. “I understand that, Josh. Just as I hope _you_ understand that I have my reasons—very good reasons, if I may add—to be concerned with how you’re avoiding the subject of this trauma.”

He sucked his teeth at the word.

“Am I to take it, then, that you’ve been discussing your sisters with your friends? I know you’ve said it’s a difficult topic to broach with your parents, for obvious reasons.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Again, Hill glossed over the exasperation in Josh’s voice. “I’m certainly glad to hear that! During times of loss and grief, sometimes we find that our friends are easier to confide in than family or…well,” he gestured vaguely to himself, “ _Others_ , I suppose. Outsiders. In our last session, I know you had expressed some hesitance in having these conversations with them—have Chris and Ashley been understanding, then?”

“No.” That time, he _did_ wince. It had come out too abruptly, too snappishly to backpedal from. He had already dropped his eyes from Hill, looking instead to the sprawling piece of artwork behind him, but he could _feel_ his eyes on him, appraising. “Not them,” he corrected, his manner much more controlled. “There’s no point talking to them about the girls.”

“Oh?” Hill sat forward just enough to make it obvious how much the revelation interested him. “Why would that be?”

He’d pulled his upper lip between his teeth to worry it there as he realized Hill wasn’t about to let it go. “Ash can’t take back what she did. Chris is _always_ going to side with _her_ more than _me_ , so. Like I said. No point.” When he glanced back up, Hill was still watching him, saying nothing. It was all Josh could do to keep from outwardly glowering. Hill wasn’t just prodding at this sore spot, he was jumping up and down on it wearing soccer cleats. “I talk to _Sam_ about it,” he added after a while, wondering why it felt so much like an admission of guilt.

“I don’t believe you’ve mentioned Sam before. Well…other than I think you said she had been there, at the lodge.” There was an airiness to Hill’s voice that Josh didn’t like. Maybe it was just paranoia, but it felt _exactly_ like the sort of feigned nonchalance an interrogator used when questioning a suspect.

“She and Hannah are—” _Were_. She and Hannah _were_ tight. His entire body cringed into itself, turning the words to dust in his mouth. It was a concerted effort to keep from looking up at Hill, even as he cleared his throat and tried again. “Hannah’s friend.” He’d pushed himself away from the desk earlier, but it was then that he stood, his head rushing from the suddenness of it. “Our friend, now.” The words still felt gritty. Wrong. “My friend.”

Hill hummed in understanding and slowly nodded his head. “I see.”

“If we could, you know, _move on_ from this, that’d be just _swell._ ” Josh took up pacing between the couch and one of the bookshelves, never pausing for too long. Any second now, Hill would object. He’d tell him to sit back down, to puke up all of his _feelings,_ to tell him _what_ he and Sam said about Beth and Hannah, to do some deep breathing and slow his heart, to…

“If you want to talk about your medication, we can talk about your medication.”

He stopped mid-step, doing his best not to gawk outright at him. That was…much less of a fight than he had been expecting. “Okay…” Josh said slowly, pointedly turning his attention to the bookshelf. “Good.”

Though he couldn’t _see_ Hill, he could still hear the incessant scritch-scratch of his pen. “I do have to preface this discussion, however. I understand where you’re coming from, Josh. You’re experiencing unpleasant physical events that _could_ be blamed, in part, on the Amitriptyline, so you’d rather that be the cause than your grief. But—” He made a sharp sound of disapproval when Josh began to interject. “ _But_. I ask that you also look at this from _my_ point of view, as a medical professional. Josh, your history with medication is…well, let’s just say it’s less than ideal. The Fluoxetine made you ill, the Duloxetine made you ill…and while it is admittedly true that people _can_ be particularly sensitive to medications across the board, the chances of them _all_ making you feel worse are very, very low.”

It wasn’t what Josh had wanted to hear. He picked a book off the shelf (something about coping with childhood PTSD), flipping through it with feigned interest.

“With that in mind,” Hill continued, “I’m hesitant to simply prescribe you something _else_ to help you sleep. Since it sounds to me as though your principle concern isn’t your inability to fall asleep or stay asleep, but instead the intensity of your nightmares, I’m going to suggest that we begin to taper your dosage a bit. We may find that we’re able to lessen the dose in such a way that it still helps manage your symptoms while getting rid of some of the side effects.” There was a papery sound from the desk. Had Josh turned to look, he would’ve seen Hill rifling through a familiar manila folder. “Currently, you’re taking…ninety milligrams before bed, correct?”

No response. Josh only squinted his eyes slightly, acting as though trying to memorize the contents of the book in his hands for later reference. And maybe he was; some of that shit sounded _awfully_ familiar.

“Josh?”

Still nothing.

“ _Josh_ ,” Hill said, voice a bit more forceful than before. “You _are_ taking the ninety milligrams, right?”

His impulse was to close the book. It would’ve been so…dramatic. That’s how it would’ve gone down in one of his dad’s movies: The handsome, grizzled survivor, at wit’s end, punctuating the odd doctor’s question with a quiet but authoritative _thump_. But this _wasn’t_ one of his dad’s movies. He _wasn’t_ the wisecracking hero of a bloody torture porn, he was just some smartass nineteen year old kid with two dead sisters and a growing desire to jump out of the window. So the book stayed open. He was surprised to realize that the heat creeping up from his collar was _shame_ —the same shame that was keeping him from looking Hill full in the face. “It…depends.” His words came out slowly, his tongue feeling fat and stupid inside the cage of his teeth.

A weighty silence hung between them like noxious fog. Josh’s face grew hotter.

“It depends.” As he repeated it, Hill rubbed at his mouth with the pads of his fingers. “What does it depend on?”

“How bad of a day it was.”

The desk creaked when Hill leaned his full weight against it, his elbows set atop Josh’s records. “You’ve been increasing how much you take.” It wasn’t a question, wasn’t an accusation. It was a statement of fact, cold and simple.

He _did_ close the book then, but it was hardly the melodramatic sound he had imagined it to be. There was a frenzy to it that wouldn’t have been out of place in the middle of a preteen’s temper tantrum. “It wasn’t _helping!_ ” he insisted, whirling back to Hill. “It wasn’t _enough_ , so when it got really bad, when my head got _really_ bad, I’d just…yeah, I’d take more. It’s supposed to _help_. It’s supposed to help me _manage_ , and I wasn’t _managing_.”

Hill didn’t seem surprised—maybe a bit disappointed, _definitely_ thoughtful, but not surprised. His fingers were steepled under his chin as he seemed to consider the situation, his lips occasionally disappearing into a hard line before reappearing again. “Well…” he began, words slow and precise and clearly measured, “I think we have an answer as to why you’ve started having these nightmares, Josh.” He let the insinuation hang, busying himself with his notepad instead of confirming that yes indeed, this had been a monster of Josh’s own making.

Not that he _needed_ to confirm that, of course. Josh had already averted his eyes, acting as though he couldn’t quite get the book back in its spot on the shelf. After a couple failed attempts at sliding it back in place, he dourly began pushing other books aside to make room. Only once the quiet had wrapped its tendrils around him and began squeezing did he speak up again. “So…I should stop taking it, then.”

“ _No_. No, that is _not_ what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that there is a reason I prescribed you that particular dose. By exceeding it, you’re ushering in a whole _host_ of unwanted side effects, Josh.”

“But if I stop taking it, then I’ll stop having the dreams.” He turned back to the desk, watching Hill scribbling frantically in his notes.

“I am _not_ recommending you stop,” Hill repeated, lifting his eyes for only a moment. “We’re going to have to taper you down back to your original dose, and then we can we can take it from there.” He continued writing until something appeared to occur to him. His brow furrowed and he sat up straighter, giving Josh a _very_ pointed look. “I cannot stress this enough, Josh: Simply _stopping_ your medication, _especially_ after you’ve been increasing your intake, can _only_ hurt you. It will make things _considerably_ worse.”

But it would stop the dreams.

“Okay,” Josh shrugged, keeping his face impassive. He didn’t try to argue with Hill, simply letting the issue drop. Any further discussion would’ve been just like talking to Chris and Ashley about the twins. There wasn’t any _point_. Josh had made up his mind the second his suspicions had been confirmed. He was going to get some fucking sleep.

***

**Thursday, April 10, 2014  
7:15pm**

_I really shouldn’t have waited so fucking long to register for classes._

The thought echoed in Chris’s head with each step he took, acting as a self-flagellation of sorts. Signing up for late classes was one of the most heinous cardinal sins of college life, second only to signing up for _early_ classes. Well, _that,_ and wearing your lanyard around your neck. He’d done fine for the first couple weeks of the semester, but something about _consistently_ pushing dinner farther and farther back in the evening wore down the fabric of a man’s very soul.

_I really shouldn’t have waited so fucking long to register for classes, I really shouldn’t have waited so fucking long to register for classes, I really shouldn’t have waited…_

It continued playing over and over, punctuating each step up the dingy staircase. His stomach had stopped growling about fifteen minutes ago and had started _roaring_ instead, drowning out most of his other thoughts. He’d popped into one of the dining halls just long enough to grab some fries, and _God_ he just needed to get into the dorm so he could tear into the grease-splotched paper bag and _inhale_ those fuckers. Wouldn’t even rummage around for ketchup packets. Wouldn’t even stop to chew. No, there was no time to chew, what with less than a month until finals and three monstrous projects to finish before then. Chewing was for people who did their work _on time_.

He swiped his cardkey in the door, cursing when the light flashed red. He tried again, cursed again, and then switched hands, jamming the card as if he could will it to work through sheer frustration alone.

When the lock _finally_ clicked and the door _finally_ opened, his stomach dropped before he could really figure out why. All Chris knew was that one moment he was _starving_ , and the next, he wanted _very much_ to puke. His brain took a full second or two to catch up to his eyes.

The problem wasn’t that the room was clean (although admittedly it was a major clue that something was up), but it was certainly the first thing he noticed. The second thing he noticed was the stack of boxes. The third thing was…well…

“Oho, so you _do_ remember which dorm’s ours.” He tried to keep his voice jovial even as he found himself moving with the delicate uncertainty of a mouse nearing a trap. It took almost all of his concentration to make himself look casual as he set down his food and let his backpack drop from his shoulders. “Here I was, thinking I’d have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.”

Josh made a quiet sound that might’ve been a laugh, had it not been so short. He stood in front of his bed, stripped down to its ugly university-requisite blue mattress, rolling up a poster. Judging by the color scheme, Chris knew implicitly that it was for John Carpenter’s _The Thing_.

The walls seemed almost obscenely bare, now that he looked at them. The room itself felt _wrong_ —naked. This was not good.

Still making his clumsy attempts at acting normally, Chris unzipped his bag and pulled his laptop out, gently lowering it onto his desk. “What’s with the uh, renovations?” There was no way to hide the way his voice strained around the lump his heart was making in his throat, thudding away like a helicopter’s motor ( _thuppita-thuppita-thuppita_ ).

“Leavin’,” Josh said breezily enough. He slid a rubber band around the poster and it made a small, unimportant snapping sound as he released it.

“Leavin’,” Chris parroted.

“Glad we could have this scintillating discussion.” There was a hollow noise when Josh dropped the poster tube onto the floor in favor of taping up one of the boxes on the bed.

He watched Josh go about it for a moment, taking a deep breath to try and steady his jangled nerves. He’d been around the block enough to know that something was brewing. All the room needed was some flickering lights. Maybe some ambient thunder in the background. Someone screaming in the stairwell. That would’ve _really_ set the scene. Still, he did his best to tiptoe around what he thought were the big questions, praying there was a chance this _wouldn’t_ go tits-up. “You gonna drive up for finals, then?”

“Nope.”

“No?”

“What, are you my echo all of a sudden? I said no. I’m bailing. I’ve _already_ bailed. Bailing has occurred. So now,” for what Chris could _only_ imagine was dramatic effect, Josh dropped a box onto the floor. “Now, I get the fuck outta Dodge and go home. That okay with you? Or is there some exit interview I gotta fill out with HR before I can leave?”

Chris blinked against his confusion, brow knit. “I thought—you said you were finishing the semester up. There’s only a month—”

“Oh fuck, only a _month?_ Well shit, guess I better unpack all this, huh? Lemme just scoot on down and see if I can re-enroll real quick! Only a month, boy howdy, that changes _everything!_ ”

“Uhhh?” Much as he hated to admit it, the grunt was the only noise Chris could get himself to make. Josh’s rancor hadn’t exactly been unexpected, but there was something… _off_ about the whole situation. Very off. Incredibly off. Somehow, his heart had managed to split in two, becoming twin lumps of pulsing stone in his throat and stomach. Whatever this was, it was only revving up. He felt very much like a cockroach just then, knowing that when the shoe _did_ drop, it was going to drop _on_ him.

“Such a conversationalist. Remind me why you’re single. Can’t believe the panties don’t just _drop_ when you hit the ladies with such stunning wit and panache.”

“Wh- _what?_ ” He realized he’d been gripping onto the back of his desk chair, knuckles white with the effort. “Dude, what are you _talking about?_ ”

“Nothing.”

“Noth—oh come on. You show up here for the first time in weeks, pack all your shit, and then get mad at me when I ask what’s up? You never said _anything_ about dropping out before the semester was over, I think I like…have a _right_ to know what’s going on. At _least_ as a roommate, like—”

“Maybe you don’t get to lecture me about who I go around telling my personal business to, huh? You think of that?” Josh whirled on him, and Chris realized how _bad_ he looked. Even with a yard or so between them, Josh’s skin looked _clammy_ ; he was pale, his eyes seemed almost swollen, and if he stood in one place for too long he appeared to sway on his feet. He looked like he had a gnarly case of the flu at the very _least_. He lifted a hand to gesture as he spoke, and it was impossible not to notice the way his fingers shook. “Hey, here’s another thought! Maybe I’m not totally jazzed to tell you shit when we _both_ know you’re just gonna go run and tell Ash the _second_ I’m out of earshot. Maybe you should just _assume_ that if I _want_ you to know something, I’ll go ahead and put it in the group chat where _everyone_ can see it, so I don’t have to worry about you _immediately_ recounting all the sweet deets to Little-Miss-Perfect.”

His face lit up with indignant fury. Every ounce of concern he’d felt for Josh flew out the window, replaced with the unintelligible buzz of anger. “I-I don’t tell her _shit_ about your private stuff! I don’t just go around telling other people your business, you know!”

“No. I _don’t_ know, actually.”

“ _What?!_ I—what is—where is this _coming from?_ This has _nothing_ to do with you moving out!” It made no sense, but somehow he was already on the defensive. “We don’t just—I don’t—this isn’t—What do you think I told Ash?” His mouth wasn’t working the way he needed it to, lips feeling Novocain-numb. The world around him was suddenly achingly clear, making Josh’s accusations all the more bizarre. He had expected trouble when he walked in and saw Josh. He’d _been_ expecting trouble since the moment his texts had started going unanswered, weeks ago. Nothing could’ve prepared him for _this_.

Josh shook his head and rolled his eyes. “What do I think…you told Ashley…” he repeated slowly. “I already told you: Fucking. Everything. That’s how it goes. It’s how it always goes. You two are just always having your little chit-chats, aren’t you? Always.”

“I have. _Literally_. No idea what you’re talking about.” Chris tried desperately to rein the situation back in, keeping his voice even. “Look, obviously you’re pissed. I get that. But I didn’t tell Ash _anything?_ I don’t even know what you think I—”

“No. No, I’m sure you didn’t _tell_ her anything!” He clapped his hands together once, the sound brittle and too sharp in the close confines of the dorm. “But you give her juuuust enough, don’t you? You leave little fucking clues for her to piece together like she does. You just fucking pepper them in like it’s no big, and then sit back and relax while she draws her little conclusions and plays detective. Don’t fucking bullshit me, man. Don’t you _fucking_ bullshit me.”

“Don’t—okay, no, fuck this.” Releasing the chair took more effort than he’d anticipated; his fingers actually ached when he uncurled them. “What did I do? Can you just— _clearly_ you have something you wanna say, so can you just say it? What did I do? Tell me that much, man, did I _do_ something to piss you off? Did I _do_ something to get you so mad at me? Because—because clearly, _clearly_ , you’re mad at me. And you’ve _been_ mad at me. So I’d appreciate it if you’d just let me _know_ so that I could do something about it.”

Standing arms akimbo, Josh narrowed his eyes. “…did you _do_ something? Are you actually standing here, asking me if you _did_ something?”

“Yeah, I…yeah.” His face was burning. He hated this. He hated this so fucking much. How had things gotten this bad?

“You are honestly unbelievable, Cochise. Un-fucking-believable.”

“I can’t…Jesus _Christ_ , Josh! I can’t apologize for something if I don’t know what it is! I can’t—”

“No, _Christopher_ , don’t worry, _Christopher_ , there’s nothing for you to apologize for, _Christopher_ , because you didn’t _do_ anything. Therein lies the problem, Watson, my dear man—you never fucking _do anything_ , do you?”

“ _What?!_ ”

Josh threw his arms out to his sides, lip curled in disgust. The anger was not helping his appearance any. Had anyone walked through the door at that precise second, they might’ve thought he was about to puke all over the floor ( _Chris_ was certainly of that opinion). “ _What_ what? Can’t say it much clearer than that, Cochise—you! Never! Do! _Anything!_ You just sit around, taking up space, wasting oxygen, and then, when I actually fucking _need_ you, SURPRISE! You _continue_ to do jack shit!”

“It’s like talking to a wall,” Chris said mostly to himself, hands raking anxiously through his hair. “It is absolutely like talking to a wall. _What_ are you _talking about?!_ ”

“It always comes back to Ashley, you know that? Always. Always! Because that’s all that matters, right? Not me, not my sisters, not—”

“What the fuck do you mean, ‘not you’?! Since _when_ have I not been there _for you_? I have been trying, and trying, and _trying_ to talk to you, and you keep shrugging me off! You keep ignoring me! You keep talking to _Sam instead of me!_ You’re the one who hasn’t been there, not me!”

It hadn’t been the right thing to say, apparently, as Josh stood up straight again, shaking his head in indignation. “Why the _fuck_ would I want to talk to _you_ , when you’re only gonna side with Ashley and the rest of those fucks who got my sisters kill—”

“ _It’s not our fault! It’s not any of our fault!_ ” A wave of heat rushed to Chris’s face when he realized he’d been shouting. Josh had fixed him with a stare that was equal parts fury and shock, eyes wide. Chris was immediately aware of how dry his throat felt, but his fingers were tingling with adrenaline, his hunger and exhaustion translating so easily into anger. He swallowed hard, trying desperately not to let on that the outburst had been unintentional. Lowering his voice to its normal volume, he continued, “We’re all— _all_ —messed up over what happened to Beth and Hannah. What happened wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, but _Josh_ , man, it wasn’t our fault!”

Josh held his gaze for another tick before scoffing derisively. It was the sort of sound one made when deciding they were above responding.

It was also the sort of sound, Chris realized with no small amount of alarm, that _apparently_ made his blood fucking _boil_. “No—no! You don’t…you don’t get to just sit there and keep blaming us and blaming us for something we didn’t fucking _do_ , Josh. You don’t get to _do_ that! Losing the twins sucks—”

“Oh, it sucks? It _sucks_ , Chris? Is that what it does? Does it _suck?_ ”

“—but _none_ of us did _anything_ to make it happen! _We_ didn’t write the fucking note, Josh! _We_ didn’t read the fucking note, _we_ didn’t run out into the fucking snow, and _we_ didn’t fucking do _anything_ to either of them! We didn’t do _any_ of that! If you’re going to be pissed, and i-i-if you’re going to hate someone for what happened, then fucking hate Emily and Mike! Hate Jessica! Hate Matt—fuck, _he_ was the one who fucking _taped it!_ But you don’t get to be mad at _us,_ because like _you_ just said—we didn’t _fucking do anything!_ ”

In an instant, Josh was in his face, an accusatory finger stabbing into his chest.

From that distance, Chris could _feel_ the fever coming off of him. Oh, something was obscenely wrong, here.

“Maybe,” Josh began, words spat through a grit jaw, “If you had fucking _done_ _something_ that night instead of just fucking _sitting there_ , drunk off your _ass_ , my sisters would still be _alive_.”

What in God’s name was he supposed to say to that?

He just stared and stared, face still tingling and hot, breath stuck between his ribs. Chris just stared at Josh, and Josh just stared at him, and an eternity seemed to pass between them like that.

Then Josh turned. He bent down to grab a box, hoisting it up to balance on his shoulder. “I’ll get the rest of that shit tomorrow,” he said over his shoulder, wrenching the door open before disappearing into the hallway. Behind him, the door shut with a whisper that felt like a slap.

Dizzy and sick with a perverse sense of shame, Chris stood where he was. He couldn’t find it in himself to move. The past few minutes played on repeat in his head, details already warping and growing stranger in the silence that came rolling in on Josh’s heels. Was this what whiplash felt like? His ears were ringing. Slowly, very slowly, he sat in front of his desk, trying to ease the shaking in his hands. His laptop remained closed. His phone remained on his desk. Josh’s boxes remained on the floor. For the longest time, nothing moved.

And then his stomach growled, reminding him of the life he’d had before he’d walked into the dorm. He’d had _plans_ for the night. He’d been going to _eat._ Chris made a small noise of disgust when he went to grab the bag of fries and found it freezing cold. Not that it mattered—he wasn’t all that hungry, on second thought. He swept his arm to the side, sending the greasy bag tumbling into the trashcan he kept at the base of his desk.

The tips of his fingers still buzzed with what he could only figure was some heady combination of adrenaline and anger. He flexed his hands a few times to try and dispel the feeling, but it lingered, becoming the uncomfortable pin-and-needle prickling of a sleeping limb. It was for _that_ reason—or at least so he told himself—that his phone seemed to tremble as he picked it up. His fingers were steady enough as he bypassed the group text (long-since relabeled “The Almosts,” capital T, capital A), opening a new thread and adding two names.

The tingling in his fingers felt worse the longer he stared at the blank text. He cycled through what he _wanted_ to send out. ‘Josh is out of his GODDAMN mind,’ was the first one that occurred to him, but no, no, that wouldn’t do. ‘Guess who just won the shittiest friend competition?’ was another. ‘Who’s got two thumbs, a foot in his mouth, and no roommate?’ None of them were _right_ , though. He actually managed to type out ‘Well…it finally happened’ before he deleted it entirely and closed his inbox altogether.

That wasn’t fair— _none_ of what he wanted to say was fair. What would the use of saying _anything_ like that to Sam and Ash be? What was the _point?_ All it would do was stir them up. Sam would worry about Josh, Ashley would worry about _him_ , everyone would go to bed feeling like shit, and to what end? So he could have some small passive-aggressive catharsis? The impulse was strong, but he wasn’t a fucking twelve-year-old posting vague callout statuses on Facebook anymore, and he knew that the only thing he’d achieve by telling the girls about the fight would be making _four_ people miserable instead of just two.

Running off and telling Ashley (and to a lesser extent, Sam) would also be proving Josh right. The thought brought another painful flush to his neck. He wouldn’t do that.

Besides, he found he didn’t really _want_ to talk to anyone just then. He wanted to turn all the lights off, get into bed, pull the sheets over his head, and sleep until shit blew over. It would, he knew, because it always _did_. It was the same formula they’d been following since puberty had hit: One of them would get mad, neither would say anything about it, things would stew until they boiled over, Josh would tear him a new one regardless of what the initial injustice had been, Chris would apologize profusely, shit would calm down again and they’d be buds like nothing ever happened, rinse, wash, repeat.

This would be no different.

Chris became uncomfortably aware of how quiet the room was, how strangely the small sounds he made seemed to echo now that half of the dorm was completely devoid of any objects that might absorb them. He’d gotten so _used_ to Josh not actually _being_ there, but it was easy enough to pretend things were okay when his sheets were rumpled on the bed and his old posters were hung up.

Under the desk, he toed his shoes off and stood, all but throwing himself onto his bed. He didn’t need at the time to know it was still too early for him to actually go to sleep (nor did he think the rushing blood in his ears would _let_ him), yet the allure of curling into a ball and staring blankly out the window for an hour or two was suddenly incredibly appealing.

It turned out to be a mistake. As he closed his eyes, all he could hear was his own voice. All he could see was that first snide look on Josh’s face. Chris was the sort of person who cringed himself to the point of nausea when thinking about embarrassing things he’d done when he was _ten_. The freshness of _this_ particular incident made that desire to implode exponentially worse.

_This_ was why he always ended up apologizing. _This_ was why he always threw himself under the bus, no matter what. _This_ was why he tried to _hard_ to always keep his fucking mouth shut.

There was nothing, absolutely _nothing_ , worse than the icy burn of guilt that accompanied the fear he’d hurt someone’s feelings or done something wrong. He was always the mediator, the middleman, the one who smoothed shit over to try and ensure everyone was happy. In junior high, he’d once said he’d rather jump in front of an oncoming train than _know_ someone was pissed at him. At the time, everyone at the table had laughed. But he hadn’t been joking. And wasn’t _that_ fucked up. That was definitely _some_ sort of deep-seated psychological issue, but _Lord Almighty_ , he didn’t have time to ponder _that_ tonight.

Through the walls of the dorm, he could hear the not-so-muffled voices of the neighbors as they laughed about something. Their timing wasn’t _great_.

He knew things would be calmer in the morning, and that all he had to do was find a way to get his mind off of the fight for the time being, but still…

Just as he was thinking that there was no way in the great blue fuck he was going to get _any_ of his classwork done that night, his phone buzzed in his hand.

Ashley  
  
Hey when you get back into your dorm, can you let me know? I hate to do this but my mom thinks she royally screwed up her work computer, and I have no idea what she wants me to do about it, so…  
I just kinda figured…since you’re pretty much our IT support…  
Honestly I think she got that weird porn virus that’s going around because she’s REFUSING to let me see it but what can you do.  


Sometimes—not always _,_ but just often enough for it to feel a little spooky—it was like Ashley _knew_ when shit was up.

Though his chest was still tight with the sick discomfort the fight had brewed up, Chris could already feel the first hints of relief running coolly through his veins. Without prying eyes or ears, it was easy enough for him to admit that there were few things that made him feel better than talking to her. He leapt on the opportunity to be distracted, making a silent promise to himself that, no matter what, he would _not_ say anything about Josh, angry or otherwise. He would _not_ prove him right.

Ashley  
  
i really doubt jamie’s got a porn virus  
  
I don’t know…  
She clicks on unnamed attachments and links embedded in emails.  
why  
  
would  
  
she  
  
do  
  
that  
  
Because she’s a mom.  
I think it’s in the mom manual, right between ‘stern disappointment’ and ‘unhealthy interest in quartz and burning sage.’  
i think our moms got different manuals ash  
  
momuals  
  
tell her to turn it off and turn it back on again  
  
see if that helps  
  
it always does  
  
It always does.  
And…  


He waited a moment.

Ashley  
  
And…  
Okay hang on…  


He waited another moment.

Ashley  
  
She says it’s a miracle, and you’re a genius. So I’m assuming it worked.  
ty ty i'll be here all week  
  
while i can assure you no miracles happened here on this day  
  
i WILL accept the title of genius  
  
tell her to stop clicking random links ok  
  
especially if the email subject line is about erectile dysfunction  
  
that’s how they get ya you know  
  
get you all curious and shit  
  
then BOOM  
  
malware  
  
Yeah okay, I’ll get right on that.  
Hey Mom? Yeah, stop opening erectile dysfunction emails.  
I’m sure she’ll love that.  
no one loves erectile dysfunction ash  
  
Eugh.  
you can quote me on that too  
  
‘no one loves erectile dysfunction’ – chris hartley, 2014  
  
Guess I found my yearbook quote..  
!!!!!!!!!!!!  
  
That was SO a joke.  
erectile dysfunction is no laughing matter ash  
  
oh wait  
  
‘erectile dysfunction is no laughing matter’ – chris hartley, 2014  
  
Okay, literally can we stop talking about erectile dysfunction?  
Please.  
i mean ok  
  
no need to get so stiff about it  
  
get it  
  
stiff  
  
because  
  
Uh huh.  
How's it going over there?  
You get that exam back yet?  
no on the exam and class was fine  
  
Oh well that's a bummer.  
Stuff okay besides that?  


There was no fooling Ashley. Ever. He groaned to himself, rolling onto his side as he replied.

Ashley  
  
no comment  
  
:\  
Should I take that as a no?  
Did something go down?  
Was it...  


Oh, he hated the pause that followed. Hated it. Despised it. The pause meant she knew, because she _always_ seemed to know when something bad had happened. The girl was good at context clues, he had to give her that…still, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t say anything. So he didn’t. He watched the screen for a couple seconds (each feeling like a lifetime) until the telltale ellipsis appeared on her side of the thread again.

Ashley  
  
Was it...  
Did one of the guys do something?  
if it please the court your honor  
  
my attorney has suggested i take the 5th on this one  
  
:(  
So you don’t want to talk about it?  


No.

Yes.

Maybe.

He wanted to _call_ her—that was what he wanted to do. He wanted to call her and put her on speaker, set the phone on his desk or pillow, and just listen to her talk about nothing. He wanted to get out of bed and drive back home and spend the night on the Browns’ couch. He wanted things to feel normal again. He wanted things to feel _okay_ again. He wanted everyone to stop being afraid of talking about how angry and sad and lost they all were. _  
_

Ashley  
  
idk  
  
not right now  
  
not right this second  
  
maybe later  
  
Okay...  
Wanna talk about something else to get your mind off it?  
god yes  
  
fill me in on all the hot goss from back home  
  
You think people tell me hot goss?  
Do you KNOW me?  
I get passed over in roll call.  
ok then tell me the thirdhand lukewarm goss you heard in the hallways  
  
or saw scribbled on a bathroom stall  
  
First of all, no one writes on the stalls in the girls’ room.  
really?????  
  
lame  
  
our bathrooms were full of top notch graffiti  
  
and lots of tiny drawings of dicks  
  
ok tbh mostly dicks  
  
some of them not even that tiny really  
  
Fascinating.  
But hmmm okay…well the trig teacher had to go to the er yesterday in the middle of class..  
I wasn’t there because it was third period and I was in study hall, but I guess it was a HUGE deal..  
Turns out she’s super allergic to pineapple, go figure..  
and she just what  
  
ate a bunch of it before third period  
  
Yeah!  
public school man  
  
tax dollars hard at work  
  
Um…we have a fire drill planned for next Wednesday, so that’ll be…exciting?  
ash  
  
please don’t be offended but like  
  
this is the best you got?  
  
these are the most sizzling stories you can offer me  
  
in this  
  
my time of greatest need  
  
math teacher got some hives and maybe there’s gonna be a fire drill  
  
fr?  
  
i thought you were supposed to be the writer  
  
i read that romantic period piece of yours that sam sent us  
  
i thought you’d weave me a similar tapestry with your words  
  
I TOLD you I didn’t know any gossip!  
All anyone wants to talk about right now is prom, and it’s just repetitive and boring at this point.  
Oooh what color dress are you wearing? Did you know so and so’s going with so and so?  
B-O-R-I-N-G.  
aw snap that’s coming up isn’t it  
  
you planning on going?  
  
So I can stand around all night in uncomfortable shoes and hang out with two of the Creative Writing club people and their dates?  
Yeah, it sounds like a really fantastic time.  
hey i’m pretty sure it’s a law that if you don’t dance to cottoneyed joe at least once a year the government takes you out  
  
where did they come from you’ll ask  
  
where did you go everyone else will ask  
  
where DID they come from???  
  
cottoneyed joe  
  
cmon it’s your senior prom!  
  
who misses their senior prom?  
  
People whose friends all graduated way before them!  


Something about that made his chest cramp up in an entirely different way. It was so easy to forget that Ashley was a full two years behind him. It had always felt, to some degree, like she was _older_. Probably due to the fact she’d been reading at a college level since fourth grade, maybe due to her always having a voice-of-reason lecture locked and loaded and ready to go, _definitely_ due to her throwing around antiquated grandma phrases like “Go suck an egg” when she was pissed. Whatever it was, the nauseating adrenaline from before had metamorphosed into a new kind of queasiness as he was presented with two equally depressing images: Ashley doing homework alone in her bedroom while everyone else was at prom, and Ashley sitting alone at a poorly decorated table in some convention center’s ballroom while watching everyone else take selfies and dance badly to _Gangnam Style_.

Both were pretty terrible in their own distinct way.

Ashley  
  
…a valid point  
  
it was fun when the three of us went tho  
  
you could still have fun!  
  
It was fun back then because I was WITH people, Chris! My FRIENDS!  
And don’t get me wrong, like I’m sure it would be okay to hang with the CW people or even the drama kids…  
Well, okay, let’s be real, here…a select few of the drama kids.  
a VERY select few  
  
But they’re not…you know.  
My GROUP.  
I’m not going to be brokenhearted about it or anything.  
School dances are always stupid, and they’re always the SAME.  
Someone gets kicked out for being drunk, someone wears a white tux and top hat because they think it’s funny, someone throws up outside, someone smells like they’re literally covered in pot, there’s ALWAYS a girl crying in the bathroom…  
well that one’s probably because there’s nothing fun written on the walls  
  
like seriously what do you DO while you’re peeing  
  
Besides, like I said, it’d be weird going without any of you guys.  
I’ll survive not going.  
it's still a bummer  
  


Chris rolled onto his back, momentarily setting his phone down on his chest. He knew what he _wanted_ to say. He _always_ knew what he wanted to say. When it came to _knowing_ what to say, he was usually pretty good; it was actually _saying_ the damn thing that held him back. Trying to say things the right way to Josh sometimes felt like navigating a minefield (if the night had proved anything, it was that). Trying to say things the right way to Ash, though…that felt a little more like a particularly heated game of _Cards Against Humanity_. He had to find something that was just funny enough to get a reaction, catered just enough to her sensibilities to really hit home, and just safe enough that even if it wasn’t the winner, the loss wouldn’t sting too badly.

He took a deep breath and then, figuring he’d already fucked up enough that night to stew in anxiety for any longer than he had to, he began to type again.

Ashley  
  
you want me to come back home and we can stage a sick rebellious prom-crash?  
  
think sk8r boi era avril lavigne  
  
we can stick it to the man by wearing too much eyeliner and ties that are too skinny  
  


His jaw tightened as he waited for her to answer.

The desire to throw his phone across the room and just never check again was strong.

Ashley  
  
…are you serious?  
what  
  
about reawakening the spirit of pop punk?  
  
if i can find a skateboard lying around i sure am  
  
i might even have some gloves i can cut the fingers off of  
  
think of the possibilities  
  


Good. Good. Not his best work, but a good enough recovery. If she seemed freaked out, he could play it off as a joke. He was _so_ good at that—playing shit off as a joke. So very, very good at it.

Ashley  
  
No doofus, I meant about coming home.  
I mean, if you wanted, I know that they let people buy tickets for their dates as long as they’re under 21.  


Had anyone else been around to see it, he would’ve fought them tooth and nail, denying and deflecting until he ran out of breath. But there was no one else in the dorm, so there was no reason to hide the ridiculous smile spreading across his face. There was _certainly_ no one there to make fun of the nervously giddy laugh that escaped him. (A result of the leftover adrenaline, of course…nothing more than that.)

Ashley  
  
ashley brown  
  
is this  
  
is this a prom-posal  
  
You know what, forget it, it was stupid.  
i was hoping for a flashmob  
  
or at least a hand painted sign  
  
Oh my GOD!  
I said forget itttttt!  
nah know what  
  
let’s do it  
  
let’s go to prom  
  
…for real?  
for realzies  
  
You don’t have to say that just because you feel obligated.  
It’s going to be stupid.  
oh i'm sure it’s going to be awful  
  
of that i have no doubt  
  
but i don’t feel obligated jfc  
  
hmu with the date later and i'll be sure i'm home  
  
Okay, and I’ll get the tickets!  
so uh  
  
i guess now’s a bad time to tell you  
  
i am definitely planning on a white tux/top hat combo  
  
I take it back.  
We’re not going.  


And so he was able to push the fight from his mind, if only for the time being. In the back of his mind, Chris knew he’d have to deal with the fallout tomorrow, maybe even Saturday…Of course, by then, things would’ve cooled down. There were bigger things for him to think about just then. Things like prom. The situation between him and Josh would be fine—in the end, it always _was_.

***

**Friday, April 11, 2014  
8:49pm**

He began to suspect he was wrong when he returned from dinner the next day and found no new texts from Josh. That morning, he’d shot him a brief apology and asked if he’d wanted to talk…the answer to that seemed to be a resounding ‘ _no_.’ Worse yet, it looked as if the girls were inexplicably getting the same treatment. He double-checked the group text, quickly scrolling through the day’s messages, and nope—not a peep from Josh. Neither Ashley nor Sam seemed concerned about it (why _would_ they be?), even though Ashley had _specifically_ directed a question to him and Sam had responded to something he’d said Thursday afternoon. There he was, doing his best to refrain from spilling his guts about the whole messy ordeal to them, and there _Josh_ was, avoiding them as though they already knew all the juicy bits. As though Chris had already tattled.

More than anything else, staring at the unanswered texts made him _tired_. Was it that he hadn’t sounded contrite _enough?_ Chris tapped on Josh’s name, opening the thread between the two of them, and tried again.

Josh  
  
hey man look i'm really sorry about last night  
i feel incredibly fuckin shitty and i know you’re prolly pissed and i don’t blame you for that  
but i really didn’t mean to upset you fr  
can you just idk let me know you’re ok? you haven’t been responding in the grouptext  
i won’t even answer if you don’t want me to  


He set the phone back down on his desk, waiting for it to buzz with a response. It didn’t.

***

**Saturday, April 12, 2014  
1:23pm**

Josh  
  
heyyy still haven’t heard back  
i really can’t tell you how sorry i am josh  
i shouldn’t have been all up in your face  
i was acting like a shitty little kid ok and i mean it i'll do whatev to make it up to you  
just like hmu ok i'm starting to get worried lol  


The seed of guilt that had been sown in his gut bloomed into something prickly and terrible, making it all but impossible to focus on any of the work he had to do before finals. He called Josh, frowning when, after three rings, he was sent to voicemail. That settled it, right? That had to mean Josh had rejected his call, that he didn’t _want_ to talk to Chris. But if that was the case, if it was _really_ so open-and-shut, _why_ was he suddenly doubting the number of rings it usually took?

*******

**Sunday, April 13, 2014  
12:00pm**

Josh  
  
dude seriously i get it you’re mad at me  
sam keeps asking me if something’s wrong  
if you don’t wanna talk to me ok fine but will you PLEASE answer SOMEONE  
text sam or ash or the guys or idc anyone ok  
just let someone know that you’re ok  
at least turn your read receipts on  


He tried calling again, only to find himself rolled over to voicemail. He didn’t leave a message, knowing that if Josh _had_ been trying to ignore him, the texts and missed calls would be sufficient. Besides, he knew there was no way to keep the anxiety from his voice. This was beginning to feel like October all over again. If he didn’t hear from him by tomorrow, he was going to call Linda. Maybe even Bob. Fuck, maybe he’d pack up and drive back home to go knock on the Washington’s door in person.

Jesus tap-dancing Christ—he prayed this wasn’t going to be like October. He couldn’t handle another October.

*******

**Monday, April 14, 2014  
8:37pm**

He’d taken the aisle seat in class in case he had to dip into the hall to answer a call, had kept his phone on mute so that he could keep it on the desk where he could see it…all for nothing. Every few seconds, his eyes flit to the phone, hoping to see something— _anything_ —from Josh. Each time the screen lit up, he could feel his heart in his throat, but each time it was someone else. _  
_

Josh  
  
are you ok???  
if you don’t answer me in five fucking min i'm calling your mom  
i stg i'm not fucking around josh  


Back and forth, back and forth, he paced from one side of the dorm to the other, gnawing on the insides of his cheeks as he stared down at the phone, willing it to light up. If there was one thing Josh _hated_ , it was his parents getting brought into shit. Even _before_ the incident with the twins, an uncomfortable familial tension had been there. A tension made worse, no doubt, by Josh dropping out before the semester finished.

As if by magic, the phone began to buzz in his hand, the screen displaying Josh’s name. “ _Christ_ dude!” He was shouting, he _knew_ he was shouting, voice taut in his throat. “You scared the living shit—” His stomach dropped into his feet when he realized that the voice on the other line most definitely, unquestionably, undeniably, was _not_ Josh’s. Chris felt his knees turn into jelly. He sat down on the bed that used to be Josh’s. He closed his eyes. “Hi Linda.”

*******

**Tuesday, April 15, 2014  
4:16pm**

How many times had he taken this path? How often had he trudged up the stairs, hand skimming the rotten railing? There was no way for him to know exactly, but he suspected that he’d be able to find his way blindfolded. Hell, he’d probably be able to follow the divots his own shoes had worn into the ground. But in all of those times, he couldn’t remember _one_ where he’d felt so deeply, abysmally, _cosmically_ worried.

Once in junior year, he’d made the admittedly awful decision of visiting when coming down off a wicked case of food poisoning, so there was definitely a _precedent_ for him barfing at the Browns’…unsurprisingly, that didn’t exactly make him feel _better._

One way or another, he knew he had to get a handle on his face. When it came to sniffing out a calamity, Ashley was almost supernaturally adept. She said it was a writer thing, that when you spent as much time manipulating and perfecting characters’ body language, you sort of figured out how to spot it in real life. Maybe that was true. Josh had always thought differently, though. Out of earshot and with the sort of smug self-assuredness only a psych major could have, _he’d_ called it hypervigilance, a state of anxiety so keen, so well-tuned, that people picked up on the tiny shit other people might miss—minute fluctuations in tone of voice, shifts in posture, microexpressions that were little more than subconscious twitches of facial muscles. Every time, he’d follow it by saying sometimes it was just an evolutionary leftover from back when people had to outrun predators…and other times, it was an indicator of something _else_ , a nasty little parting gift you sometimes saw in people who…

But maybe it was high time Josh stopped playing armchair psychologist with their friends.

He stopped as he reached the Browns’ floor, letting himself lean back against a wall. He pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, pinching the bridge of his nose while he fought against the wave of unpleasantness rising inside of him. Honestly, had anyone asked, Chris would’ve been hard pressed to tell them whether he thought he was going to puke or sob. Both were looking mighty appealing, at the moment.

So he stood there in the breezeway, trying his damnedest to focus on the sweet smell of spring air or the God-awful Easter wreath on the neighbor’s door or literally _anything_ other than the matter at hand. Ashley would be freaked out as it was, what with him showing up unannounced; if he showed up unannounced _and_ crying, she might actually explode. He took a deep breath in, slowly let it out, slid his glasses back down, and steeled himself. If he lost it now, there’d be no going back. He had to keep his head about him.

He’d barely rapped his knuckle against the door when the barking began, followed by muted footsteps.

“Charlie! Charlie, co—oh good grief. Will you just…”

There was no way of seeing whether Ashley was at the peephole, but Chris waved once all the same, knowing full well that she was on her tip-toes, peering out at him.

The door had only just swung open, but already he saw worry plain as day on Ashley’s face.

So much for his plan.

She didn’t give him an opportunity to so much as say hello before she was on him, hands clasped into tight, anxious fists at her sides. “What’s wrong? Why didn’t you text to say you were home?” He opened his mouth to say something— _anything_ , really—to try and deescalate her panic, and again she didn’t let him. “Oh my God,” she said, eyes wide as they searched his face. “Oh my God, is it your dad? His heart thing—”

There was a moment of confusion so intense on his end that for a second, all Chris could do was stare at her and try to make sense of her words. “I—no, _no_ , my dad’s fine!”

“Oh thank God.” Ashley visibly relaxed, her entire body seeming to deflate with her breath. She slouched against the doorframe, fixing him with an exasperated stare. “Don’t _scare_ me like that, holy crap. You have this _look_ on your face, like someone _died_ , and—” she froze up again, eyes growing wide once more. Her voice fell to a terrified whisper, “Did someone die?”

“No one died.”

She went lax again, this time pressing a hand to her collarbone in an attempt to steady her heart. “Geez, then why do you _look_ like that?”

“It’s just my face, Ash. This is what it looks like. You’ve seen my parents, this is the best the genetic lottery could do for me.”

Ashley rolled her eyes before taking a step back, keeping Charlie away from the door with the side of her foot. She smiled, but it was noticeably stiff and more than just a shade suspicious. It was obvious that he’d caught her off-guard—Ashley was not good with surprises, be they visits, revelations, or loud noises. “Ha ha ha. You should consider a career in standup,” she joked. “You wanna come in? Or…?”

He did. He did _very much_ want to go in. He wanted to step into the Browns’ apartment, collapse onto the couch, put his head in his hands, and tell Ashley everything. _Everything_. The weight had been so heavy on his shoulders for so long, and there was nothing he wanted more than to unload it. Just _some_ —not _all_ —enough that maybe he could stand up straight again without feeling like he might snap in two. Enough that when things like this happened with Josh, he wouldn’t have to worry about rehearsing a convincing story in his head over and over and over again, lest someone notice a detail out of place and catch him in the lie. He wanted someone else to _know_. And shit…how badly he wanted that person to be Ashley.

In that moment, standing in the awkward silence of the landing, it was suddenly abundantly clear that something inside of him had changed.  
  
‘Best Friend’ had never been a title in his mind, but a _tier_. If it _had_ been a title…if it _had_ been some metaphorical nametag that could belong to one person, and one person _only_ …well, he was beginning to suspect that it didn’t belong to Josh anymore. He was struck with the horrendous realization that maybe it hadn’t belonged to Josh for a while, actually.  
  
As hard as he tried, he couldn’t remember the last time they’d woken each other up in the middle of the night with pointless Snapchats meant to make each other laugh, or the last time they’d slyly texted each other from three feet away to crack jokes about other people in the room. Hell, he couldn’t remember the last time they’d sat silently and just peacefully _existed_ in the same space. Somewhere down the line, likely caught between fall semester of last year and the Blackwood lodge, Josh had dropped that ‘Best Friend’ nametag. Maybe he’d peeled it off himself, letting it flutter quietly to the ground in his wake. Maybe Chris had poked and prodded at it until it came loose like an old scab. Maybe it just hadn’t been made to stick around for that long. Whatever the case, it was gone—or at the very least, it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. These days, Josh wasn’t the person Chris texted when something good happened and he wanted to celebrate, he wasn’t the person Chris called when something bad happened and he needed to hear a comforting voice, he wasn’t the person who Chris could argue with and then be cool with a few minutes later, he wasn’t the person wanted to chill with in his downtime.  
  
_Ashley_ was.

Everyone could make fun of him and tease him and say that it was all just because he was crushing on her, but at the end of the day, that was a load of horseshit. Ashley had been a constant ( _the_ constant) in his life since junior high, been there through good and bad, had always listened, had always helped him pick up the pieces of other people’s problems…and as he stood there in her doorway, it occurred to him that one way or another, this had been an inevitability. What happened to the twins had simply hurried the process along.

Mentally, he shook himself out of the maelstrom of his own thoughts, trying not to see how earnest the concern on Ashley’s face was. She’d gone about as pale as he had, Chris thought, and even without knowing what was happening, she looked _so_ close to tears. Then again, she always kind of _did_.

“Chris,” she said slowly, her uncertainty becoming more and more clear with each second he didn’t step into the apartment, “I know you didn’t drive all the way down from campus just to say hi. That’s a long freaking trip.” There was a beat of silence as she searched his face, and Chris cringed inwardly, remembering what Josh had accused him of. Maybe he _did_ leave her clues, maybe she _did_ piece things together from the shreds of information he gave. She was _so good_ at putting two and two together. “What happened?”

Without a shred of shame, he noticed that he was dangerously, _dangerously_ close to breaking down, himself. “Do you want to go for a drive?” he managed to ask after an eon, making no excuses for the crack in his voice.

Her house keys were already in her hand. Ashley closed the door behind her, locking it with fingers that had already begun to tremble with anxiety again. “We going somewhere in particular?” she asked, voice low and serious and somehow very _adult_ in its matter-of-factness.

“Yeah,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “We’re gonna visit Sam, I think.”

Ashley looked back up at that, eyes scanning his face beneath a knitted brow. Her confusion softened; her dread became more evident. “It’s Josh.”

He didn’t have the right words, not just then. Chris knew he had to save those words, the good ones, the _correct_ ones, for when they were all together. If he gave them to Ashley now, he wouldn’t have them for Sam later, and that wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be good. So he simply took a deep breath through his nose, letting his shoulders fall with the exhale.

It told Ashley all she needed. “ _Shit_ ,” she whispered, following him down the stairs and into the parking lot with tense, hurried steps. “ _Shitshitshit._ ”

***

**6:20pm**

Sam hadn’t realized how worried she’d been until her phone buzzed on her desk and a wave of relief washed over her. She marked her spot in the textbook by dropping her pencil into the crease at its spine, hoping it would be enough to hold it open to the right page for the time being. From where she lay sprawled out on her bed, she reached for the phone, confusion creasing her forehead when the notification wasn’t what she had expected.

2 People  
  
Ash  
Hey Sam!  
I hope this isn’t too random, but we wanted to stop by and say hi really quick…are you in your dorm?  
Oh, related question, which dorm is yours?  


She checked the clock, trying to do the math in her head before giving up entirely. It was too late to be messing around with numbers on a Tuesday. Something about it felt odd (probably the use of ‘we’ without any further explanation—it would’ve been a _long_ trip for Chris to make, yet it didn’t seem super likely that Ashley would come with _only_ Josh…), but she quickly shot off a reply. _Immediately_ , three little dots began flashing under Ashley’s name.

Then they disappeared.

They appeared again…and then disappeared again.

Ah well. It was weird, but things tended to get weird with the group of them. Well…not _weird_ , but definitely _awkward_.

_That_ was the word it always came back to: Awkward. Sam laughed a little, sliding her phone into her pocket as she heaved herself off of her bed, smoothing her clothes out to make herself a little more presentable. If there was one thing their little unit ( _The_ _Almosts_ , she reminded herself) had in common, it was that.

Ashley was the worst of them in that regard, gangly and only mid-recovery from what Sam figured must’ve been a horrendous pseudo-scene phase in junior high; she did, after all, still tend to swoop her bangs and wear the sleeves of her shirts too long, caught somewhere in between mall goth and ambitious graduate student, somehow looking perpetually overworked and underfed. Chris was the middle of the scale, aware of his dorkiness to the point of wielding it like a weapon. He had a habit of making unintentionally unflattering facial expressions at the worst possible moment, and while his jokes were terrible, bordering on _prosecutable_ most of the time, they got the job done. Josh, though…he was the only one who had seemed to have actually grown _into_ his weirdness like a puppy growing into its too-big paws. Josh carried himself with too much ease and panache to still be considered a full-fledged dork—he’d managed to metamorphose _‘awkward_ ’ into ‘ _eccentric_.’

But together, they were bizarre in their similarity. It had struck her as oddly comforting, how very quickly they’d all seemed to click together, fitting neatly into place as though she had been friends with the three of _them_ all along—not the twins. They fit together in that special, inexplicable way that only theater kids, band geeks, and AV club members could. There was a downside to that too, Sam thought. Namely, it meant _she_ was probably fairly awkward, herself.

She could almost _hear_ Chris’s voice in her head: _Uh, ya think? Why don’t you go eat some quinoa and discuss it with a big ol’ maple tree? Be careful not to get any sap on your sweater when you’re hugging on it.  
_

The tiny smile found its way to her face again, and she shook her head. “Yeah…okay, that’s fair,” she said to the air, stretching her shoulders out. Her stomach gave a rumble at the movement, reminding her it had been a good, long while since she’d had anything to eat—quinoa or otherwise. She hoped the gang would want to grab a bite…that would be a fun little pick-me-up.

A tentative knock sounded at the door, signaling their arrival. It was only as Sam set her hand on the cold metal of the door handle that she was able to place what had been nagging at the back of her head. The message Ashley had sent hadn’t been in the group text. Before she had time enough to really think about what _that_ meant, she’d pulled the door open and found herself face to face with it.

“Hi,” Ashley said, something about the sweetness of her voice striking her as saccharine, bringing to mind a diet soda. Behind her, Chris pulled a hand out of his pocket long enough to give a casual wave that somehow managed to miss ‘casual’ entirely. They took up the better part of the doorway, but there was ample space for Sam to see past them, into the hall.

And Josh was not with them.

“Hey guys.” She looked between the two of them, sure that her puzzlement was obvious to them both. “This is a fun surprise…what’s up?”

“Oh, you know…we were just… _around_ , and thought it would be neat to stop in…say hello…” Sam noticed how very careful Ashley was _not_ to look at her as she said it. “And I’ve been meaning to check out the dorm situation. You know this is where I’m coming in the fall, right? I’m sure I told you that…I mean, I was between a few schools, but since Mom teaches at one of the satellites, they cover a lot of the tui—”

Sam didn’t interrupt her, and she _certainly_ didn’t call her out. She just watched her as she spoke, her smile accommodating but doubtful.

Ashley looked up to Chris, letting her words trail off mid-sentence.

She had just enough time to think _Oh no_ before understanding slammed into her with all the impact of a baseball bat to the gut. Sam actually felt the air go out from her, her lungs suddenly in her throat. “What’s wrong?” she asked, not unlike Ashley had earlier.

Ashley kept looking to Chris, who appeared to be very interested in the nametags pasted on the side of the doorframe. Neither of them said anything, and what was when she _knew_.

“It’s Josh,” she said flatly, the taste of fear heavy on the back of her tongue. “It is, isn’t it? He hasn’t been answering any of my texts, and when I called I only got his voicemail, and—is he okay?”

Chris took a long breath before lowering his eyes to her. “Is your roommate around?”

She opened the door wider, stepping back so they could come in. “No. She’s out. Sorority thing, I don’t know. _Is he okay?_ ”

“He’s…” Chris seemed to think it over, running a hand anxiously through his hair. “He’s fine, he’s fine. Just, uh…well, I think…we need to talk. And I didn’t want to do it over text or on the phone…I just thought…ugh.”

Legs moving of their own accord, Sam found herself back at her bed. Her knees felt like they were made out of Jell-O that hadn’t quite set yet, so she eased herself down onto the mattress, staring intently at Chris and Ashley. She realized after only a moment that, whatever Chris had to say, he had to say to them _both_ —Ashley looked every inch as confused (and _terrified_ ) as she felt. It didn’t bring her a whole lot of relief.

The two of them milled about for a few seconds, looking uncomfortable. Finally, Chris set a hand on the chair at Sam’s desk, raising his eyebrows in a silent question. She nodded and he pulled it out, sitting down with a grunt of exhaustion. Ashley stayed standing, though she leaned against one of the posts of Sam’s bed.

“You know, the longer you wait to explain, the more freaked out we’re going to be.” There was a snap to Ashley’s voice that Sam had only heard once or twice before…and that had been back at the lodge. She couldn’t stop fidgeting with the rings on her fingers, twisting each of them around in turn, her eyes on Chris, her eyebrows drawn up in a way that made her look as though she were in pain.

“Ash…”

“I didn’t say _anything_ about it the whole ride here, and that was almost an entire _hour_ , Chris.”

“I know, Ash. Can I just—”

Sam knit her fingers together and braced herself for the worst. She realized was getting very, very good at that.

Chris’s face had gone the color of old oatmeal, not doing much to bolster _anyone’s_ confidence. “He’s _fine_ ,” he said again, gesturing vaguely with both hands. “There’s just been…uh…a development…in the situation.”

“ _What_ situation?”

Lord above, Sam was glad that Ashley was taking it upon herself to do most of the talking. She found she couldn’t wrench her eyes from off of Chris, though she wasn’t really sure why. In the back of her mind, in the very farthest recesses where she stored unpleasant things, a quiet warning bell had begun to chime.

He sighed loudly, back to nervously messing with his hair. “Did you guys…I mean, you both knew he was planning on dropping out, right? Of school?”

“Uh huh.”

“Well. He…did.” Chris dropped his hands onto his lap with an unimportant sound, lifting his eyes to the girls. “Um…Thursday, I think, or maybe the day before. I’m not really positive on those specifics.” He cleared his throat, “Definitely packed up his stuff and left, though. I…know that much.”

Sitting up a bit straighter, Sam looked between them again, disappointed but not surprised to see the same confusion on Ashley’s face. “Wait, wait…what do you mean he _left?_ I thought the plan was finishing the semester—that’s all he’s _ever_ said, that he was going to finish up as best he could, take Incompletes in the stuff he missed too much of, and then just take some time? Wasn’t that…wasn’t that the plan?”

“It was. But you know what they say about plans. Meant to be broken, and all that.”

Even with her knuckles pressed anxiously to her mouth, Ashley managed to mutter “That’s _rules_ ,” loud enough to be heard. When the other two turned to look at her, she didn’t even bother to shrug. “Sorry. Nervous.”

“Don’t be _nervous_ ,” Chris sighed, “I already said he’s _fine_ —”

“I’m _nervous_ because _you_ look like I _should be_.” She dropped her hand from her mouth, opting instead to fold her arms across her chest. “So…he took his stuff and went home…”

Sam swallowed around the lump in her throat. “And _now_ he’s not answering his phone. I’m gonna go ahead and guess we’re missing something here.”

Chris had taken to looking back down at his hands. “Uh…he was pretty pissed when he left. Really… _really_ pissed, actually. And I thought… _maybe_ he just wasn’t talking to _me_ because of that. But uh…I realized that wasn’t exactly the case.”

Some part of her wanted to ask what Josh had been mad about, suspecting she probably wouldn’t like the answer. She chanced a glance over to Ashley again, this time watching as understanding dawned in her eyes, deepening the concerned crease in her forehead; it was then that she _knew_ she wouldn’t like Chris’s answer. “I tried in the group, out of the group, and called once,” she admitted, the corners of her mouth tightening. “Nothing.”

“Yeah, I tried a few times, too.”

“So…last night I ended up talking to Linda for a while.” He was aware, immediately, of both of their eyes on him. “Like I said, he’s _fine_. She said school and stuff was just too much after the twins, so…he’s gonna be MIA for a grip. I guess he took some of his shit, packed up, and he’s gonna spend some time in Burbank at the studio with Bob. Get some…hands-on experience there, or whatever.”

“And he can’t _answer_ us?” Sam hadn’t intended for it to come out as stiffly as it had. She was equal parts relieved and dazed, feeling oddly abandoned.

Chris’s shoulders rose and fell in a helpless shrug. “She said he left his phone and his laptop. Wanted some time to himself, I guess.”

Oh she didn’t like that. She didn’t like that one bit.

Before Sam was able to piece together what she wanted to say, Ashley chimed in. “He’s done this sort of thing before,” she said quickly, though it was hard to tell whether she was trying to comfort Sam or herself with the reassurance. Her body language changed completely, switching over from terrified to relieved. She crossed the room in a few vaguely shaky steps, probably to try and work out some of the nervous energy she’d pent up. “He spent a good part of October over there, too…it’s just…” she shrugged uncertainly, as if only then realizing how strange it all was. “It’s a thing that he does sometimes. Gets away and does the movie stuff.” She passed in front of Chris, moving over to one wall to examine the photographs on one of the desks.

Sam had been inspecting her bedspread all the while, trying to process everything. But something Ashley said…well, it snagged something in the back of her mind like a hangnail catching on a sweater. She frowned as it came to her, and she lifted her head. “October?”

Ashley nodded.

Strangely— _suspiciously_ —Chris did not. Sam only half-noticed it, but he’d turned to watch her more carefully, a peculiar expression on his face.

Her eyes narrowed in thought. She felt very much as though she had just seen the first question of an exam: She _almost_ knew the answer, but maybe not quite. The warning bells in her head grew louder. “He was in Burbank then? Because I thought Hannah said—” the words died in her mouth when Chris caught her attention more fully. Now behind Ashley (and therefore safely out of her view), he’d begun frantically shaking his head, waving both hands in front of his throat in the universal sign to shut the fuck up. Sam’s eyes moved rapidly between his panic and Ashley’s inattention, and she bought herself a moment of time by clearing her throat. “Never mind. I think I’m still just…frazzled.” She met Chris’s eyes again, searching for some kind of resolution. There was none to be found, so she just dropped her hands onto her knees and tightened the corners of her mouth once more.

Picking up right where she left off, Chris piped in, “Yeah. I think…I think ‘frazzled’ is a good way to put it.” He managed a tired smile when Ashley offered him a brief look over her shoulder. “But I just thought it would be…I don’t know… _better_ if you guys heard it from me instead of getting radio silence.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, voice distant. She was still putting everything together in her head. The closer she came to finishing the puzzle, the more she disliked it. Without meaning to, she realized she was intently watching Chris’s face.

“Didn’t have to _scare_ us like that.” The edge had gone out of Ashley’s voice, but she made it clear enough that she hadn’t appreciated the theatrics of it all. “Swear to God, you took like…three years off my lifespan, showing up out of nowhere, looking like someone died. _Sam’s_ probably even _more_ freaked out…”

“I’m fine.” She didn’t think she actually _was_ , though.

Usually, that was about the time Chris came in with some kind of jokingly apologetic retort to lighten the mood. He didn’t. His tired smile reappeared, now looking significantly less convincing. Had he actually _tried_ to say something to ease the tension, it was clear at once that he wouldn’t have had the chance.

Ashley all but jumped out of her skin, obviously still shaking off her residual adrenaline, groaning as she pulled her phone out of her pocket. “ _Shoot_. I _knew_ I forgot something…um…this is my mom. She’s probably freaked that I’m not at home, so…if I just like, pop into the hall to take this, can you guys let me back in, in a sec?”

“Nope,” Sam said, surprised at how light she had gotten her voice to sound. “Gonna leave you out there forever.”

“Gee, thanks.”

The _click_ of the door shutting was punctuated by a silence so uncomfortable and so tense that the air itself felt heavier.

Sam was still pointedly staring a hole through Chris’s forehead. He, on the other hand, was looking down at the floor with the kind of intensity that suggested someone had written the answers to all of life’s greatest questions on the toe of his shoe. She folded her hands in her lap and waited, watching him anxiously rubbing at the back of his neck.

For the first few seconds, it really appeared that he wasn’t going to say anything. But then he glanced quickly over his shoulder, making sure that the door was shut tight. The panic that had been so evident on his face was gone, replaced by…huh. It was hard to say _precisely_ what had taken its place. He didn’t look scared, _per se_ , or angry, or embarrassed, or much of anything Sam could put a name to. There _was_ something like a deep, deep exhaustion in his eyes, she thought, but beyond that, it was difficult to parse. When he spoke, his voice was low, conspiratorial. “What did Hannah say about…what did she say happened?”

She continued to watch him with the same sort of caution. “I wasn’t…supposed to say,” she admitted, shoulders slouching. “Guess it doesn’t really matter now, huh?”

The look he gave her wasn’t a smile, but it was reassuring in its own way. It made her realize, for the _very_ first time, that she wasn’t the _only_ one who’d been guarding secrets for the Washington siblings. Not for the first time that evening, she couldn’t help but dwell on how very little she liked that thought.

“I still feel like I shouldn’t talk about it.”

“Yeah, well, I think…it’s pretty safe to say that whatever _you_ know, _I_ know…and I think things would just be, uh, easier if _I_ knew what _you_ know.” The usual laughter was gone from Chris’s voice. He kept shooting anxious glances back towards the door, only increasing her apprehension.

Deep breath in, deep breath out. “Hannah said Josh was in the hospital for most of October. Not Burbank.”

Chris didn’t react to the statement at first. He simply seemed to take it in before dropping his eyes down to the floor again. “Did she say _why?_ ”

“She did.” She caught on just in time to keep herself from stumbling. Somehow, she’d found herself to be an unwilling participant, playing a terrible kind of game. They were dancing, she and Chris—dancing around saying anything the other might _not_ have known. Smack dab between them, throbbing like Poe’s horrible heart, was the truth of the matter. Neither one of them wanted to be the one to wrench it out from under the floorboards to bring it into the light of day. Neither one of them wanted to betray the trust that had been put in them. As they sat, they were forced to come to terms with the knowledge that they’d both only known one side of some tragic story.

Worse, they were realizing how very easy it would be to make those two versions converge into something more…whole.

Sam’s tongue felt dry in her mouth as she thought back to the night of the prank. The more she pictured it, the more vividly the night came back to her. When she’d walked into the kitchen to Ashley shaking Chris awake, something Hannah had mentioned to her earlier in the week suddenly came crashing back. Something about Josh being on some sort of medication. Some sort of _heavy_ medication. She’d _asked_ Chris if Josh should’ve been drinking. She’d _asked_ him. And maybe it was just her memory playing tricks on her, but as she replayed the events of the conversation…hadn’t he reacted in some small, bizarre way? Hadn’t he given her a particular look? A worried stare? Had he been trying to size her up even then? “Do _you_ know why?”

His head bobbed up and down once. “I do. What did Hannah tell you?” He asked it courteously enough, but there was an underlying exasperation to his voice that made her feel like she was being lectured by an older brother. She was still trying to figure out precisely how _much_ it would be safe to divulge when Chris sighed, lowering his head back into his hands. “Sam,” he said, his exhaustion palpable, “I don’t know how long Ash is gonna be on the phone. Please. Just…help me out here, okay?”

It was her turn to avert her eyes. “Hannah said that…” Ugh, and there it was again, the pang of guilt. She’d promised Hannah— _swore_ to her—that she wouldn’t tell anyone _anything_ about it. She grit her jaw, closed her eyes, and let the words drip from her mouth like vomit. “She said she was just relieved…that he…made it out alive.” Her eyes were still closed, but she thought she could feel the heat of Chris’s stare all the same. She rolled her shoulders to try and chase away the goosebumps that had begun pricking up across her back.

“Yeah,” Chris said after a time, voice hoarse. “Yeah.”

Sam went silent again, fully intending to let the conversation drop off. She couldn’t, though…not when something he’d said belatedly caught up with her. “Wait…does _Ash_ not know? Did…did Josh not _tell_ her?” It was all she could do to keep from reeling back—the idea stung her skin like a smack across the mouth.

He cast another wary look over his shoulder towards the door. “I’m surprised he told the _twins_.” It wasn’t _exactly_ an answer to her question, leaving the thought to fester and itch behind her eyes.

“ _You_ never told her?”

“No Sam, I never told her.”

She stared. She didn’t _want_ to keep talking about it, she really didn’t, but the situation was so surreal that she couldn’t help gaping at him, childlike in her disoriented uncertainty. “You guys talk about _everything_ , how could it just…not come up? Didn’t she ask questions when—”

“When _what_ , Sam? When he went to Burbank? To spend time with his dad?” Chris looked to her again, face forlorn. “It wasn’t my story to _tell_. Josh said he didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t ask questions. I just didn’t tell anyone. And yeah, sure, I know I fuck up sometimes, I make shitty mistakes, I end up putting my foot in my mouth more often than I like to admit, but if someone tells me to keep something a secret, I’m going to keep it a secret, okay? I’m a lot of things, but I like to think I’m a good fucking friend.”

That time Sam _did_ reel back, her shoulders tapping against the headboard of her bed. She blinked away her surprise, choking on the guilt that filled her throat at the look on Chris’s face. Her mouth hung open slightly as she tried to think of something to say. Nothing came to her. In a flash, her chest felt close to bursting open.

He hadn’t told Ashley. The guilt and confusion that had been scattering her thoughts melted away into a newly burgeoning horror. Hannah had been so upset, so broken by what happened that she’d felt she _had_ to tell Sam. It hadn’t been enough that Beth had known—she had needed the support, the commiseration, the comfort of someone else helping her carry a piece of her grief. Chris hadn’t told _anyone_. He’d just kept it locked up tight, safe from prying eyes and ears. Sam had felt badly enough going back on her word not to say anything, and Hannah wasn’t even _around_ to feel betrayed by it; she couldn’t even begin to fathom what _Chris_ must’ve been feeling, just then.

She did, however, have a slightly better idea of what had made Josh so angry before he moved out of their dorm.

Suddenly very aware of how quiet she’d gotten, Sam leaned a little closer to Chris. “You are,” she said softly, nodding in hopes of reassuring him. “You _are_ a good friend.”

Something about his expression made her doubt that he believed her. “Yeah. Well. I think—” Both of them startled at the knocking coming from the door, moving in unison to look towards it. “Look, let’s just…can we talk about this later? We should talk about this later. Alone.”

Sam nodded again. “Okay. Later.” She watched as Chris got up from the chair to let Ashley back in, letting herself go lax, slumping against the frame of her bed. She caught herself checking her phone and—knowing what she now knew—felt unspeakably stupid for it. She hoped Hannah and Beth wouldn’t have been too mad at her for talking to Chris. And God, she hoped _Josh_ wouldn’t be, either.


	6. Where (everyone keeps their head)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another quick reminder that while the author is a psychologist by trade (and therefore gets carte blanche when poking fun at psych majors), she is NOT a licensed therapist by any means, and nothing written in this fic should be taken as psychological advice or opinion. 
> 
> Please. Please, I’m but a simple writer.
> 
> Relevant warnings for this chapter: Discussions of suicide/suicidal ideation, references to mental illness, more medication talk, victim-blaming, gore, one (1) very obscure reference to another horror game (can YOU spot it???)

**Sunday, April 20, 2014  
1:49pm**

“I just know that after it happened…things were rough. Between the three of them, I mean. Because Hannah was just… _sad_. But Beth was…”

“Pissed,” Chris finished for her. “Yeah. Yeah, she sure was.”

Sam looked up from her hands, still anxiously twisting at the ring on her left index finger. When she glanced across the room, she wasn’t surprised to see Chris had taken his glasses off; it was a piece of body language she’d quickly come to understand. Already, her throat felt sore and dry. They hadn’t been talking for _that_ long, really, but God it felt like it had been years. Only a few days had passed since he and Ashley had shown up at her dorm room—as it turned out, those few days were all it had taken for anxiety to gnaw a nasty hole in Sam’s gut. “You sure we shouldn’t…you know…” she dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “ _Close the door?_ ”

Chris made a thin sound that she took to be a laugh. “Noooo. My parents know the deal. Well. The basics. The gist. They have a general working idea of the situation.”

Glad for something to else to fixate on, Sam kept her gaze pointed towards the door. Only a sliver of the hallway could be seen, the walls decorated with family photos, but it gave her the uncomfortable sensation that _anyone_ could be listening to them, nonetheless. “You sure?”

Clearly uncomfortable, he slouched further into his chair. “Sam…ugh…if I close the door, they’re gonna freak.”

“What? Why?” She looked back to him momentarily, brow furrowed.

“Because…” he said very slowly, each word an obvious ordeal to get through. “You’re a _girl_. In my room.”

It didn’t quite click for a few seconds, but when it did, she made a face.

“Okay, uh, wow? Ouch?” 

“No, it’s not—just… _really?_ ”

The tips of his ears were rapidly flushing red, even as he rolled his eyes. “They’re old-fashioned!”

“What do they think we would… _do?_ ”

“Hey, y’know, I get that like, I’m not your type or whatever, but I’d appreciate it if you showed a _little_ less disgust at the thought of a hypothetical romantic encounter with me.”

“Yeah, okay. It’s just…they _know_ I’m not Ash, right? They saw that I’m not her? Usually the blonde hair is a dead giveaway.”

Chris chose to ignore the comment, returning to the issue at hand. “So _Beth_ told you, too?” He was rubbing at his face, fingers pressing down hard on his sinuses to soothe away the first twinges of what he feared might bloom into a stress migraine. “They just…went around telling everybody?”

Sam shook her head, finding it was hard to keep her eyes away from the open door for any length of time. “No, Beth never said anything about it to me. Hannah just…Hannah said a lot.” She sighed quietly, chest aching fiercely at the memory. “A _lot_. She was really, _really_ upset. Cried about it for a long time. And even when she _said_ she was over it, I could tell that like…she wasn’t. Not _really_ , you know? It was still _there_ …this… _thing_ she had to deal with.” She pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging her legs tightly. “She said she couldn’t talk to Beth about it because she was just so _mad_ at him. She—”

“Said he was selfish. That he didn’t care about how _they_ would’ve felt if he…” Chris’s mouth took on a strange shape. “And then _they_ go and do it to _him_. Makes you glad to be an only child, huh?” There was no humor in his voice. Sam had only seen him this distraught _once_ : That first week when the four of them had been standing on the cliff in the snow, Josh’s shouts carrying on the wind as he tore into them. She didn’t like it. There was something unspeakably distressing about seeing the class clown rendered so somber. “Yeah.” 

It was quiet between them then, save for the distant sound of a lawnmower growing rhythmically closer and then farther away again. Chris sat at his desk, rocking himself slowly from side to side in his chair; Sam hunched herself protectively over her knees, her weight barely making a divot in his bedspread.

Both had been sworn to secrecy for so long that getting information out of one another had felt almost like an interrogation. There was no relief to be found from it, no solace in having coughed up their similar stories. All they’d been left with was the raw, throbbing ache that accompanied a particularly gruesome bruise. They both suspected that it could only mean one thing…that their purging was far from over.

“How are _you?_ ”

Surprised, Chris looked up from the floor, blinking sightlessly in her direction. “Uh…oh. Fine, I guess.” He considered grabbing his glasses again and then decided against it. Sometimes it was just easier when he was looking at vague blobs of color instead of an actual _face_. “I mean, not _great_ , obviously, but like. Fine.” His fingers pinched at the bridge of his nose as he thought. “Maybe not even fine. But what can you do. How’re you, though?”

It was difficult to make her shrug apparent, what with the way she was sitting. “Not great,” she repeated, voice mostly swallowed up by her knees. Her forehead creased as she frowned, and she found herself wishing the bed would just open up and swallow her whole like one of the creatures from Josh’s horror movies. “I think it’s my fault.”

He _did_ find his glasses then, putting them back on so he could better read her expression. “Wh—I—Sam, _what?_ ” Leaning forward, he tried his best to make her meet his eyes. “How could…no. No, I don’t know _what_ you think you did, but this wasn’t you. I mean…fuck, if anything…we got into a _really_ big fight the night he left. I still…don’t really know _why_ , or where it came from, but he was _pissed_. But that doesn’t mean…I—look, it…ugh.” His head dropped, he set his elbows onto his knees, and suddenly their postures were all but identical. “I don’t think it’s anyone’s… _fault_ ,” Chris tried again. “I mean…I’ve been through this with Josh before, and just…it’s no one’s _fault_ , Sam. It’s just—”

“I told him something I shouldn’t have.”

“…that was an incredibly ominous thing to say, and I gotta tell you, Sam…not really the _best_ way to preface important information.” It had been meant to sound jokey, to help lighten the mood somehow. It hadn’t worked. The attempt fell about as flat as his voice, making him sound more scared than anything else. “…what did you tell him? Again. I’m… _positive_ whatever it was wasn’t enough to _cause_ this, but…is it…something you can tell me? Or…?”

She closed her eyes and inhaled as deeply as she was able to. “Do you listen to _Radio From the Pines_?”

A wrinkle appeared between his eyebrows as he tried to place it. “No…? Should I? Are they indie, or—”

“It’s a radio show out of Blackwood Pines. Weather, news, current events…all that stuff. I’ve been listening to it since…well, since you know when. Not as much as I used to. In the beginning, I was…pretty much plugged into it twenty-four-seven, just _hoping_ …” Her throat tightened. Sam swallowed hard, backtracking a bit to try and get around _that_ mental obstacle. “Now I just sort of check once a day. Usually before bed. It’s a habit now, I think…a weird one, but…I sleep better after listening to it. I think Josh was listening to it too, at least at first. I don’t know if he still does or not.”

“Okay…” His voice was heavy with apprehension. Sam had long-since come to realize that, when it came to matters of emotion, Chris was an open book—possibly the _most_ open a book had _ever_ been, in the history of open books. It was startling how different he and Josh were, in that regard.

She took another deep breath. “And the other night…Wednesday night, um…I heard something.” Her arms tightened around her legs as she curled further into herself. “So don’t freak when I say this, because it’s definitely not what you think it’s gonna be, but…they found a body up on the mountain.”

His blood turned to ice. Without meaning to, Chris snapped to attention, his back smacking against the chair. “ _Holy shi—_ ”

“No, no, see, you didn’t…you didn’t hear me. I said it’s _not_ what you think it is. It wasn’t…it wasn’t either of them.” Sam resisted the urge to screw her face up, instead letting the wave of anguish wash over her. “The problem is…I didn’t _know_ that, at first. I came into the report halfway through, freaked out, and just…” She gestured helplessly with one hand, “I called Josh before I got the full story.” Her shoulders slouched so far down that for an instant it felt like they might snap clean off of her torso. “ _Apparently_ , in the past month, two more people have gone missing. Not all…you know, _from_ the lodge, but…in the general area. A hiker, I think, and then some journalist who wanted some pictures of the sanatorium. They don’t think the cases are related, or suspicious, or anything like that…they think they’re just all really unfortunate coincidences because of the terrain and how fast the weather can change up there, but…”

Chris felt himself slouch down as well, looking up to the ceiling to avoid seeing the distress on Sam’s face. “What the _fuck_ …what the _actual_ fuck…”

“And even then, they think the journalist probably isn’t even up there anymore, and maybe they went AWOL and ran away or something, but they can’t prove that one way or another.” The corners of her mouth tightened, “The hiker, on the other hand…” There was no hiding the shudder that worked its way up her spine. “He was up there with a group, and I guess he got turned around or something, because next thing they know, they all go back to set up camp and he’s gone. No sign of him. Until like…Wednesday. Dawn, I think. Sometime around then.”

“Oh God.”

She shrugged again. “But like I said. I didn’t _get_ all that, at first. I just heard they’d found a body. And like an absolute _idiot_ , I just…I mean…I _had_ to tell him, you know? I _had_ to. Because what _if?_ What if it _had_ been one of the girls? I couldn’t…” Sam couldn’t swallow past the lump in her throat, so she shook her head. “I shouldn’t have done that. I should’ve checked the internet for the full story first, or called the ranger station, or… _anything_. I should’ve waited ten minutes to see if they’d repeat the details. I should’ve done a million things _other than_ calling Josh, but here we are. I did. And he flipped. And then it wasn’t _anyone_ , it was just some random _guy_ who died of exposure or something.”

The chair squeaked faintly as Chris leaned back, both hands covering his face. “Ooooh man. Oh man, oh man, oh man, Sam. This is seventeen different kinds of fucked up.”

Miserable beyond words, she said nothing.

“Still not your fault,” he added quickly, realizing his mistake. “Absolutely not your fault, or anyone else’s, but what the _fuck?_ ”

“I know. It’s just…”

“A lot. It’s a lot. Like, too much, actually. The Washingtons were gonna find out eventually, Sam—it’s _their mountain_.”

“I know.”

“It never ends, huh? Just…” he let his voice trail off for a moment, rolling his eyes to the window. “Never ends.” He grunted slightly as he stood from the chair, instead perching on the edge of his bed to join Sam. Lowering his voice, he too shot a quick glance towards his bedroom door. “Hey, does…does Josh know that you know all of this? About… _everything?_ ”

The question caught her off-guard for a second. “I—no. He never brought it up, so…I didn’t, either.” She watched him nod as if to say ‘ _Good, good,’_ feeling another lurch in her stomach. It didn’t seem like the right way to end the thought. “It doesn’t change the way I think about him, you know.”

At that, Chris did his best to keep from visibly reacting. “Good,” he said stiffly, “It _shouldn’t_.” The way he’d bristled at it, the defensive way he’d come back, gave the impression that she had tread on a sore spot.

The physical closeness between them was somehow very comforting, despite the tension in the air. Sam slowly felt herself uncurling from her protective ball. Her hands slid to her knees as she readjusted herself into a cross-legged position, and almost instinctively she began rolling her shoulders to ease the knots there. There was an aching pit in her throat, somewhere between her tongue and collarbone, filling her with the strange impulse to keep talking, to fill the silence with something— _anything_ —other than the heavy cloud of their shared knowledge. “The weirdest thing about it is…well, it was Halloween when Hannah told me. She was dressed as a farmer. I was having this party at my house, and I had invited her and Beth and Josh…” Her tongue twisted when she realized what she was saying; she tried to hurry past it to gloss over the fact that she hadn’t, in fact, invited Chris (or Ashley, for that matter). “But she was the only one of them who showed up. She was just so sad most of the night, and then once everyone left, she just…” She patted at her knees thoughtfully, trying to keep her grief at bay. “She just spilled it all out. I guess he’d only been out of the hospital for a few days at that point, so…” Chancing a quick peek over, Sam couldn’t quite read the expression on Chris’s face.

“I-I’m sorry. She chose to have that… _incredibly_ delicate conversation with you dressed as—”

“A farmer, yeah.”

“A farmer. As in…‘Howdy, y’all,’ farmer.”

“Yeah. I think she was going for ‘sexy’ farmer, too, but there were more pressing matters so I didn’t really…ask.”

“Well, I mean…aren’t _all_ farmers kind of sexy? Just by nature, I mean? With their overalls and their woven baskets bursting with fresh produce.” 

She narrowed her eyes, still trying to read his face. When the first laugh bubbled up and out of her like a glut of puke, she smacked a hand over her mouth to stifle it. It was too late, though; already her shoulders were shaking with giggles, Chris not faring much better. The room filled with the tense, nearly frantic sort of laughter that followed scares or other unpleasant things, high-pitched and sharp and maybe a little _too_ loud. They’d had their talk, they’d opened old wounds to compare them to the new, and now that it was over, the only thing left to do was laugh the fear away.

“It gets worse,” Sam said, using the pad of her thumb to wipe away a tear threatening to spill over the corner of her eye. “Whatever your mental image is right now, like…prepare yourself. Because _I_ was dressed like Minnie Mouse.”

He actually _snorted_ at that, turning away from her to double over. “Shut _up!_ ”

“I _was!_ ” she laughed, clutching at her chest as she tried to pull in shallow breaths. “I _was_ , though! Like, the ears and _everything!_ ” The scene came crashing back, and for once, the lens of time magnified its ridiculousness instead of its tragedy. “So we’re—we’re just…in my bedroom, both of us _sobbing_ …” For some reason, that brought on a fresh wave of laughter, making her sound nearly hysterical, “And she’s wearing this stupid…floppy _hat_ , and I’ve got this fake nose painted on and these big, dumb gloves…”

Chris had reached the point where his laughs had turned to silent wheezes, his face bright red. He waved at her to stop, shaking his head frantically. “Nonononono, fuck you! Stop it! No more! You’re—” he collapsed into another fit, failing to keep from snorting again, “You’re fucking _making this shit up!_ ” 

Using the heels of her hands to wipe the tears from her cheeks, Sam took a few steadying breaths. “I _wish_ I was,” she sighed, clearing her throat a few times to ground herself. The jag of giggling had made her more than a little lightheaded, and she fanned herself with her hands, knowing she was likely just as red as Chris. “Because that should be a really sad memory! It was a really sad time! But now, whenever I think on it, all I can see is, well… _that_.”

“Yeah, I—” his voice cracked so badly that they both teetered on the brink of losing it again. Chris snickered, dropping his voice into a preposterously bad baritone to keep it from cracking a second time, “I can see how that might be weird.” It was his turn to screw his eyes shut and breathe deeply in an attempt to find balance again. When he’d finally managed to calm down, he reached back to rub at his neck. “But hey, the way I see it…you gotta hang onto the shit that makes you laugh, right?” 

That time, her smile felt a lot more natural. “That’s…a good way of looking at it, I think.”

He leaned over just slightly to give her knee two bracing pats. “Good talk.” 

“Good talk,” Sam agreed with another laugh. Her cheeks were still hot and tingling, her lungs sore. As somber as the room had been a few minutes ago, she was surprised to find she actually couldn’t _stop_ smiling. She’d taken a fair number of potshots at Chris’s horrible jokes in the past, but at that moment, she was unspeakably appreciative for the way he brought laughter into whatever space he was in. Maybe it was that appreciation that made her speak up again. “I’m sorry I didn’t invite you.”

“Huh? Didn’t invi—wait, to the Halloween thing?!” Chris contorted his face in disbelief before waving her off. “Yeah, no, I’m totally heartbroken that you didn’t invite me to a party that not only happened half a year ago, but _also_ no one else that I knew was at. Truly you’ve wounded me. Honestly, I-I’m not sure how I’ll ever recover.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a dick about it.”

“Sam,” he said, perfectly calm, “If I got my feelings hurt over every party I _wasn’t_ invited to, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now, because I’d be curled up in an attic somewhere, rocking back and forth and sobbing uncontrollably.” Chris stopped, pursing his lips in thought. “That example sort of got away from me. Uhhh, let me try again: If I had a dollar for every party I didn’t get invited to—”

“You’d have enough money to throw your own party?” she tried.

“What? Oh fuck no, you’re too kind to me. No one would come. No, if I had a dollar for every party I didn’t get invited to, I’d be rich enough that people would _want_ to invite me to their parties.”

“Shoot for those stars, Chris.”

He chuckled before checking his watch. “Okay, how about this…let’s cut a deal, you and me.”

“Oh, I do _not_ like the sound of that.” Like catching a yawn, she found herself absolutely unable to keep from mimicking him. She checked the time on her phone and groaned, standing up from the bed.

“No, here’s the deal,” Chris continued, shoving his own phone in his pocket as he lead her out into the hall and down the stairs. “If you have a Halloween party _this_ year, just be sure that I’m the _first_ person you invite, and _maybe_ I’ll be willing to call it even.”

“ _Maybe_ , huh?” She shielded her eyes against the glare of the sun as they headed out the front door. “Why maybe?”

“Uh…let’s see…” He unlocked his car and slid into the driver’s seat, looking to her only briefly as he fiddled with the ignition. “There’s that pesky matter of you saying you’d kill me, if given the chance.”

She clucked her tongue in disbelief, “That was _months_ ago! Are you _ever_ going to let that go?”

“Nope.”

Sam managed to click her seatbelt into place just as he began backing out of the driveway. Settling herself in for the drive, she toed her shoes off and pulled her legs up onto the seat with her, getting comfortable. “You know, with an attitude like that, it’s no wonder people don’t invite you to stuff.”

“I get invited to stuff! I mean, not parties. And not _your_ high-end shindigs, _obviously_ , but. Stuff. Sometimes.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Like _what?_ ” Her head lolled onto her shoulder as she stared up at him, eyebrows raised high enough to put them in danger of disappearing into her hairline.

Still smirking, Chris opened his mouth, seemed to think about what he was about to say, and then shut it again. He reached up with one hand, awkwardly scratching at the side of his nose while he appeared to concentrate on the road. “Like, uh, prom.”

“Aren’t you a little _old_ for—” The realization hit her a second later, causing her to sit straighter in her seat. “Wait, wait…I’m sorry, did you just say you’re going to _prom?_ Like…in the near future? Why—oh my God. Are you going with _Ashley?_ It’s _gotta_ be Ash, right? I mean who else…” Sam leaned forward, thunking her elbows down onto her knees, physically stopping herself from finishing the sentence. “See, _this_ strikes me as information you should’ve shared with the class, upfront.”

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “No, I shouldn’t have. Compared to what _else_ is going on—”

“Hey, with everything else that’s going on, I think Team Almosts could use some good news, huh?” Shrugging her shoulders, she reached out and poked him hard in the arm. “So spill it. Dish the deets. Is it a _date?_ ”

Groaning, he weakly swatted at her hand. “It’s not a _date_. It’s just two friends going to a dance. A very lame dance, I might add. I don’t know if you remember _your_ senior prom—”

“Well, it’s a lame dance _and_ dinner.” 

“Fine. It’s just a lame dance and dinner.”

“… _And_ probably After-Prom.”

“There have been no decisions as to whether or not we will be attending After-Prom.”

“Oh,” she nodded sagely, leaning her head against the window. “Does that mean you might have… _other_ plans for the night, then?” Her tone was innocent enough, but all Chris would only have to turn his head slightly to see the slow smirk spreading its way across her face.

“Oh my God.”

Sam giggled softly, “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. You already know what I think.” Before he had time to respond, she turned back to him, “Gonna get a corsage?”

“I actually hate you. Did you know that? It’s a deep, slow-burning kind of hatred. The kind that drives people to madness.”

“Are you gonna slow dance?” There was no chance she was letting up on this. No chance in hell. If she stopped talking for any amount of time, there was a very real danger that Chris would turn on the God-awful music he liked so much—the loud shit that relied _way_ too much on bass drops and synths. She had to prevent that from happening at all costs. “Are you gonna look deep into each other’s eyes and have a profoundly emotional moment of understanding?”

At the stoplight, Chris hit the brakes just a bit _too_ hard, jostling Sam against her seatbelt.

Half-sputtering, half-cackling, she yanked the seatbelt away to give herself more room. “Look, all I’m saying—”

“Oh, I know what you’re saying.” 

“ _All I’m saying_ …” Sam tried again. “Is that prom is the _perfect_ opportunity for some good, old-fashioned romance. That’s it. That’s all I got.” She held her hands up defensively. “Sounds to me like you’re already halfway there. You got a date—”

“It’s not a date!”

“Going to prom sounds like a date to me, Chris.”

In the rearview mirror, Sam watched as he rolled his eyes. “It’s not. Trust me. We’ve been to prom together before.”

Again she raised her eyebrows. “This is _also_ news to me.”

His hand was halfway to the stereo when Sam smacked it away. There was no getting out of this one, it seemed. “She came to _my_ senior prom, too. It wasn’t a big deal. _This_ isn’t a big deal.”

Sam made a wavery little noise, pretending to fawn like a child hearing a juicy rumor. “So it’s _tradition_ , huh? Still sounding romantic.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t. The three of us went together as a group— _technically_ Ash was _Josh’s_ date because he bought the tickets—”

“Oooh, scandalous.” She rifled through the center console, finding a pack of gum and popping a piece in her mouth. “Love triangle action.”

Chris grimaced, “Absolutely not. Look, it’s just…ugh.” He sighed and anxiously ran a hand through his hair, letting it rest against the back of his neck in what seemed, to Sam at least, to almost be a protective gesture. “Sam, I know you’re joking around. And that’s fine—God knows _I’m_ always doing it…But what you need to understand is…man, there are just…there are just certain _topics_ that we don’t go near, okay? I’m sure you had shit like that with…” Chris paused, wincing as he realized what he had just been about to say. “…other people in the past. Sometimes…sometimes being tight with people means you talk about _eeeeverything_ together. And sometimes it means you talk about everything _except_ X, Y, and Z.” He looked back to her, searching her face for any sign of understanding. “You feel me?”

Sam regarded him carefully, folding her arms tightly across her chest. She felt a corner of her mouth tuck in as she thought, and was almost disappointed when she could, in fact, see the logic there.

“I—ugh, you know what? Fine. Okay. So here it is. All of it. Out in the open. I don’t know if you’ve ever _experienced_ being in love with your best friend, Sam, but it’s…it’s not as easy as the Disney Channel movies would have you believe. You gotta be _careful_ with shit, and that goes _double_ for Ash, okay, because Ash has…well, she’s been through some stuff. Like, Capital-S ‘Stuff,’ and I don’t want to totally _wreck_ the relationship we have right now by doing something stupid like….”

“Like _telling her_ that?” She couldn’t help but roll her eyes, already feeling a smile starting to bubble to the surface. “I really don’t think you’d wreck anything, for what it’s worth.” Though she was _positive_ it was because he’d come _very_ close to mentioning her by name just then, Sam couldn’t help but think about Hannah and her disastrous crush on Mike.

Now _that_ …that had been a bad time. Still, she’d sat through her fair share of conversations similar to this, Hannah pining over Mike and sighing at the thought that they might never be together, that she hoped he’d only just give her a chance, that maybe if Emily wasn’t in the picture things could work…

She’d listened to enough of that to know beyond a question of a doubt that there was something _different_ in the way Chris talked about Ashley.

“Ah, see, you _say_ that, but do you _know_ that?” He shot her a pointed look, eyebrows raised. “No,” he finished for her, “No you do not. And neither do I! So. It’s just safer for everyone involved if I just take aaaaaaall my stupid feelings—” Chris pantomimed gathering a cloud of something with one hand, “—and _jam them down_ as far as I possibly can. That way _everyone’s_ happy.”

Sam groaned aloud. “You are _so_ overthinking this. First of all—no, don’t look at…keep your eyes on the road! Jesus, Chris—first of all, you’re not going to _wreck_ anything. I’ve been hanging out with you dweebs long enough to know _that_ much…give me some credit, huh? More importantly, can you just like, get over yourself for half a second there, Hamlet? Everyone, at some point or another in their life, realizes they have a crush on one of their friends. We _all_ gotta deal with it, buddy-boy. That’s just how it _goes_. You’re already super close, you have an emotional connection…it just makes sense that sometimes you start crushing.”

He got quiet for a moment as he drove, mouth set in an uncertain line. “Uh huh, well. _Be that as it may._ That’s a real nice pep talk, and you should consider hitting the talk show circuit with it, but you’ve overlooked…a _real_ key detail there, Sam.”

“Oh yeah?” she asked. “And what would that be?”

“I didn’t say I had a crush on Ash.”

Her mouth was open to reply, but she paused, running the conversation back in her head while watching him carefully. Slowly, the corners of her mouth curled upwards into a delighted grin. “No,” she agreed, “You _didn’t_ say that, huh?” She continued to beam up at him, knitting and unknitting her brow as she inspected his profile for any signs of it being another joke. “Oh, so…so _now_ you’ve got nothing to say, is that it? You just drop into a _perfectly casual_ conversation that you _love_ Ashley—”

“I have no idea why I thought this would make you drop it. Why did I think that this would make you drop it?”

“Now, are we talking like-like love? Or like family love? Or love like ‘Oh I love Chex Mix,’ love? Or ‘love,’ the tennis score? Or…”

“Holy shit. I didn’t think it was possible, but…yup, yup, you just…ah, there it is! Congratulations! You’ve officially won the title of ‘Worse Than Josh!’ How does it feel?” Without looking away from the road, he held his right fist out to her, pretending to hold a microphone.

Sam leaned in as though to speak into said mic. “I gotta say, Chris…it feels pretty good, actually.”

He shot her a deliberate look, dropping his hand back onto the wheel. “Here’s the thing. Even if Ash and I never, ever, _ever_ wind up together, that’s gonna be fine. Do you know why?”

“Why?” she asked, suspecting that it was something he’d been wanting to get off his chest.

“Do you know what I want to happen between her and me?”  
  
She mulled it over, cocking her head to the side. When the memory hit her, she actually had to bite down on the inside of her mouth to keep from laughing aloud. “Significant hand touches?”

Chris’s face screwed up in confusion. “…what?”

“You know…” she said, gesturing vaguely, “The finger thing?”  
  
“ _What?!_ ”

There was no fighting the laughter that time. “Never mind.”

“I—no, seriously, what the _fuck_ is ‘ _the finger thing?!_ ’” Chris turned to look at her, eyes wide. “For real, it sounds _bad_ , and I-I-I can’t help but feel like maybe you have the wrong idea, here.”

“Nothing, nothing! Just…say what you were gonna say. Ignore me.” Her fingers slid up to her mouth, covering the curve of her grin. “It’s a stupid inside joke,” she added.

His look suggested he didn’t believe her _at all_ , but he shook the distress off quickly enough. “I just…” Another sigh. “I just wanna make her feel _safe_ and _happy_. That’s it. And I can do that—” he raised his voice to be heard over the sugary-sweet keening noise Sam had begun to make, “— _just_ as easily being her _friend_ as I could do it as her _boy_ friend, so. It’s a nonissue.” He shrugged weakly. “It’s not a date. It’s not gonna be the kind of thing you read about in a romance novel from the teen section. And that’s _fine_. Cuz it doesn’t _need_ to be. So. That’s. That’s that.”

“That’s that.” Still smiling to herself, Sam nestled her head back against the seat’s headrest. She let a minute or two pass before she spoke up again. “Hey Chris?”

“Mhm?”  
  
“Why are you telling me all this?” 

He considered the question for a while, tapping his thumbs in no particular rhythm against the steering wheel. “Uh, cuz the drive to your dorm is like an hour long? What else you got to talk about—politics? Current events? _Sports?_ Do you want _me_ to talk about _sports_ , Sam?”

“You know what I—”

“Did you happen to see The Big Game last night? Where the Good Team took the ball and, oh, they just…they just kept that ball for themselves until they managed to score that point? My favorite was when they almost _didn’t_ score the point but then they _did_ score the point. It was magical. Also, when that one guy did that thing and the coach yelled? Pff, don’t get me started. Poetry in motion.”

“Avoiding the question won’t make it go away.” Sam futzed with the lever to recline her seat, raising her other arm up to act as a sort of pillow against her cheek. “I seem to recall you not wanting to touch the topic of you and Ash, last time I asked.”

His eyes found hers for only a second. “Well…last time you asked was a while ago. Things were different.” The click-clack of the turn signal filled the pause with the soothing familiarity of a heartbeat. “And without getting _too_ sappy…you’re one of us now, like it or not.” He briefly glanced away from the road, raising his eyebrows as he met her gaze again. “So congrats—you’re finally starting to unlock some special backstory dialogue. How honored are you?”

She narrowed her eyes, staring off into the distance. “Eh,” she finally shrugged, seesawing her hand in the air. “I could take it or leave it.”

“That’s the spirit! Hey, what _is_ friendship, after all, if not a minor inconvenience?” He snickered along with her. “Look, it’s something you were gonna figure out sooner or later, so…whatever. Just don’t go around blabbin’ to Ash, and we’ll be a-okay.”

“I won’t go blabbing to Ash. God, you’re such a baby.”

“Nah, see, I’m gonna need your solemn oath as an Almost,” Chris said, voice dropping into a register that was ridiculous in its feigned seriousness.

“An Almost oath, huh? I think I can do that.”

“Good. And if I find out you _broke_ that oath, please know that I won’t hesitate to utterly destroy you.”

“I’m trembling,” Sam said flatly. “So let me get this straight, real quick. If I’m one of the gang now, that means you could say…I’m not _almost_ an Almost?” she asked, beaming brightly up at him.

“Most certainly not! You are _not_ almost an Almost. Now, you’re _almost_ almost an Almost, meaning, of course, that you are, in fact, an Almost. If you acted in a manner a little less like the rest of the Almosts, say, behaving in a way that other people might consider competent or normal, _then_ you’d almost be an Almost, but as it stands, you are almost definitely an Almost.”

“Okay, forget it. I’m sorry I asked.”

“That’s all right, you’re forgiven. Almost.” 

“Ugh. Just let me out here in the middle of the highway. Please.” **  
**

*******

**Wednesday, April 30, 2014  
2:03pm**

“How are you feeling today?”

“Oh, me? Well I’m…I’m just _peachy_ , really. Thanks for asking.” When he looked up from his hands, he saw that Hill’s smile had grown tight. Josh lowered his feet from where he’d kicked them up onto one of the ottomans, his expression softening into something less smug. “I’m okay,” he ceded, shoulders shifting in what could’ve been a shrug, could’ve been a passing shiver. “Better than I was.” 

“Well that’s certainly good to hear!” Though his tone was chipper enough, Hill’s eyes remained unconvinced. “Am I to take that to mean the new medication is treating you all right?”

Not fully understanding why, Josh felt cowed into earnestness and lowered his eyes to his hands once more, nodding. “Yeah, they’re fine. It’s fine. _I’m_ fine.” His gaze flicked up to Hill and back down again.

“And what does ‘ _fine_ ’ mean for you, exactly?”

He popped his lips quietly a couple of times as he considered how to best go about answering the question. “I’m sleeping,” Josh began, ticking his points off on his fingers, “No more nightmares, thank _God_ …I’m eating okay…I’m thinking okay, as far as I know, uh…I’m feeling a little more… _evened out_ , emotionally, I guess…” But he’d been here before, he’d gone through this rigmarole, and while it hadn’t been _Hill_ seeing him through it last time, he remembered enough about his last stay to know what the question had _really_ been about. “ _And_ …” Still, the words felt like shards of glass catching in his throat. “It turns out that my desire to be dead was just a fleeting fancy.” He waggled his fingers mystically, not needing to look up to sense Hill’s continued doubt. “Really,” he added. “I’m fine.”

There was a low tapping sound as Hill drummed the fingers of his left hand against the desk. The large ring he wore on his pinky caught the sun from the window and gleamed dully, shooting a small disc of brassy light onto the opposite wall. “I am, of course, very glad to hear—and see—that you’re feeling a bit better than you were when you checked in.”

Surprising himself, Josh managed to overcome the desire to roll his eyes. ‘Checked in,’ made it sound like a stay at the local B&B. It glazed over some of the finer details, like signing stacks of medical release and consent forms, or the monitoring, or the cute little wristband. He bit his tongue and let it pass.

“And while I know and recognize that humor is a very important coping mechanism, I would remind you, Josh, that there’s nothing humorous about why you’re here right now.”

His face felt cold. “I know.”

“The topic is unpleasant, but I _will_ have to ask you to refrain from making light of this. Suicidal ideation is a _very_ serious matter that deserves to be treated with the proper gravitas.”

“I know.”

The drumming stopped, Hill laying his hand flat against the table. Had Josh been looking up, he would’ve seen the shift in his expression. “It’s reassuring to hear that you haven’t been experiencing any unpleasant side effects thus far, though. That’s a very good sign.”

“I know.” That time he winced, again consumed by the strange sensation that he was being reprimanded in the principle’s office. “It’s definitely been a relief.”

“I’d imagine so!” Hill continued to watch him from the other side of the desk, mouth pursed in thought, fingers steepled under his chin. He tapped his index fingers together with the slightest narrowing of his eyes before pushing himself back from the desk. “I hope you don’t mind, Josh, but I’ve taken the liberty of setting something up for our session today. Unless there’s a specific topic you’d prefer to discuss, I have an exercise here that I’d be interested in completing with you.”

He tried to keep the huff of his breath from sounding too much like a groan. If there was one thing Hill _loved_ , it was his little exercises. “Sure, why not,” Josh said, leaning forward to rest his arms atop the desk, watching with mild interest as Hill returned, hands full. “Those sure don’t look like Rorschachs.”

“Ah—well that’s because they’re not.” Unfolding a thick, rectangular strip of paper, Hill turned it over once and set it down in front of Josh on the desk. There wasn’t much to it, really; three neat lines separated it into four squares, the one farthest to the left marked ‘MOST’ in a bold typeface, the one farthest to the right marked ‘LEAST.’ He straightened it out with a meticulous little nudge of his fingers before setting down four small statuettes, each roughly the size of a saltshaker. “Now…this is, as I said, an _exercise_. It’s not a _test_ , there are no correct or incorrect answers. I’m going to tell you a short story about our hypothetical players here…” he swept his hands out, gesturing to the four white figures on the desk, “And then I’m going to ask you to give me your opinion about what you’ve heard.”

Josh looked down from Hill to the paper before him. “Hey, as long as it’s not more word association, I’m game.” He plucked one of the statues from the table, turning it over in his hand. It appeared to be an ox, or maybe some sort of steer. Without any paint, it was almost uncomfortably hard to tell. The worst part of it was its eyes, white and blank and unseeing. Curling his lip slightly, Josh gingerly set it back where it had been.

A smile touched the corners of Hill’s mouth as he settled back into his chair, folding his hands under his chin once again. “Here we have the four characters of our whimsical little anecdote. First, we have the king—a wise ruler, known for being benevolent to his people while still adhering to tradition. He serves his kingdom to the best of his ability, and never has a townsperson spoken ill of him. We then—”

“Wait, that’s it? He’s just ‘the king?’” Picking up the carving, Josh turned it over in his hand, running his thumb against the ridges and spikes of the miniature crown on its head. “He doesn’t have a _name?_ ”

“Names are _entirely_ unimportant to the story at hand, Josh.”

“The _story_ , sure, but we’re talking about my _immersion_ here, Alan. How am I supposed to form _any_ sort of opinion about this guy when he isn’t even important enough to have a _name?_ ”

To his surprise, Hill smiled an actual human smile at that, shrugging his shoulders mildly. “All right…I suppose that’s a valid enough point. A name for a king, hmm…how about Alterion?”

Josh’s face scrunched up. “That’s a weird one, but okay I guess.”

“Would you prefer I change it to something else?”  
  
“Nah, it’s your story. Go for it. Take those artistic liberties.” 

Hill watched him for a moment before continuing. “We then have King Alterion’s daughter, Princess…mmm…Bellanne. The princess is a beautiful young woman, known for her sweetness and her chastity. Some have said that she is a naïve girl, and perhaps a bit impulsive, but she is still young and there is time to outgrow that.”

“Known for her chastity, huh?” Josh sniffed noncommittally, leaning back in his seat in much the same was Hill was, making himself more comfortable. “She must be a _blast_ at parties.”

“Next, we have the gallant Prince Callafar, the heir apparent of a neighboring kingdom. A handsome young man, his boldness is matched only by his pride. Far and wide, townspeople speak of his arrogance…but also of his influence. He is not a cruel man, but maybe a tad too self-involved for his own good.” Carrying on, Hill gave Josh very little opportunity to interrupt again. “Finally, we have the bull. There isn’t much to say about him, as he’s…simply a bull.”

Wordlessly, Josh raised his eyebrows. There was a beat of silence as he (futilely) waited for Hill to get his meaning. “Does…does the _bull_ have a name?”

“The bull really doesn’t need a name, Josh.”

He held his hands up in defeat. “Fine, fine.”

“Now that you know our characters, let’s get to the meat of the story, shall we? In a beautiful, snowy kingdom, high in the mountains, there was a beautiful princess named Bellanne. So beautiful was she, that one day, she caught the eye of Prince Callafar, who was next in line to rule a neighboring kingdom. The two kingdoms had always been cordial with one another, trading goods and supplies when needed, but it was clear that Callafar’s kingdom was much larger and stronger, its influences farther-reaching than Bellanne’s. Callafar approaches Bellanne and makes his intentions known—he wants to marry her, to have her for his own. Well, the princess is distraught, as she doesn’t want to marry the prince. She tells him, in no uncertain terms, she will _not_ marry him.

“The next day, Callafar goes to Bellanne’s father, the great King Alterion, and asks _him_ for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The king immediately accepts, and why wouldn’t he? By royal decree, the match is all but required—royal blood should only wed royal blood, so on and so forth. That very night, the two are wed in the castle, pronounced man and wife. However! Before they can consummate the marriage—” Hill paused only for a moment, pretending to ignore Josh’s snickering, “Bellanne is _so_ distressed by what has happened, the situation she has found herself in, that she flees the castle. She throws herself out of the safety of its great stone walls, running out into a field. So upset is she, that she completely ignores a sign warning of the danger lurking in the field. Close by, there is a bull grazing in the moonlight. Upon seeing the girl run across the field, the bull charges her. The princess is trampled by the bull, and sadly dies of her injuries.

“What I want you to do is _this_ , Josh…” Hill leaned forward, carefully balancing his notepad on his knee. “I want you to line up our players here in order of who is _most_ guilty of Princess Bellanne’s death,” he tapped his pen on the corresponding square in front of Josh, “…to who is the _least_ guilty of it.”

Looking down at the paper, then back up at Hill, Josh chewed at his upper lip. “That’s it?”

Hill inclined his head. “That’s it. Like I said, there are no correct answers…there are no _in_ correct answers. I’m just looking for _your_ opinion, based on the details you’ve heard.”

The task seemed simple enough. He thought it over for a moment, eyes flitting between the statuettes. It didn’t take too long for him to place each character where he felt it belonged. The story, after all, seemed fairly straightforward; there wasn’t even a single moment of second-guessing himself. Carefully, he spun the paper around to show Hill his answers, taking pains to not let the statues fall over.

“An interesting order, to be sure.” There was a moment where Josh suspected maybe they were about to have a problem—Hill didn’t write anything down on his pad. But then he pointed the sharp tip of his fountain pen to the figure farthest to the right. “So…you feel that our nameless bull is the _least_ guilty of the princess’s death. How did you come to that conclusion?”

And there it was. The psychoanalysis had begun. Still, Josh couldn’t help the incredulous smile curving the corners of his mouth. “I think you said it yourself, earlier. It’s, uh…it’s just a bull.” He shrugged as if to punctuate the thought. “I mean, it’s a stupid animal, it’s not responsible for her dying.”

He shook his pen slightly, “Ah, ah, ah…it _was_ the bull who trampled the poor girl, we mustn’t forget that.”

“Well _yeah_ it trampled her, she was running through the field. That’s what bulls _do_ —they see something moving, they charge it. You can’t expect a bull _not_ to charge something that’s running and flailing and probably making a whole lotta noise. Expecting it _not_ to charge is pointless. It’s a _bull_.”

 _That_ was when Hill started writing. The scratching of his pen on the paper was almost comfortable in its familiarity. He was quiet for a moment, obviously trying to get his thoughts down onto the paper before moving on. Glancing back up, he seemed to catch sight of the apprehension on Josh’s face, and offered him a faint smile of his own. “No right or wrong answers, Josh. As it were…I happen to agree with you. Bulls can only react in the ways of which they are capable. But let us soldier on, hmm? You said that King Alterion was the second-least guilty of the princess’s death. Now that is certainly an intriguing choice! What was your thought process?”

Again, Josh shrugged. “I just—well, okay, look. The guy messed up. _Clearly_. He shouldn’t have married her off, sure, but…man, it’s complicated. Do you really want me to like…go through _all_ of it?” The only response he received was a knowing look, so he blew a tired raspberry between his lips. “Alllll right. First of all, you never said anywhere in the story that the princess _told him_ she didn’t want to be married. If she had _told him_ , that would be one thing. The guy’s not a _psychic_ , unless you left _that_ out of the story, too…so there was no way he could know she wasn’t down to clown. On the topic of his ability to see the future—or lack thereof, I guess—even if he _had_ known she didn’t want to be married, he couldn’t know she’d be _that_ upset by it, right? He probably figured she’d cry or get mad at him, or maybe…I don’t know, order a royal divorce, assuming she didn’t sign a royal pre-nup. But mostly, I don’t think he’s that guilty because you said there was the royal decree, right? They were both royal, and if she didn’t marry _him_ , she would’ve had to marry some _other_ royal asshole. The king was just trying to save some time there. _Plus_ , if the prince’s kingdom was one of their allies, _and_ super huge and strong, then yeah he’s going to want his daughter to marry into that. The king probably thought it would help the _his entire_ kingdom _and_ get him in good with the neighboring kingdom. It’s a win-win.”

Hill nodded as he wrote. “So you feel he was doing what was best for everyone.”

“Yeah. I mean, obviously not for Princess Belle, or whatever, but again, she didn’t _tell_ him, so…”

“It’s also an interesting point you raise about him wanting to earn the approval of the other kingdom.”

“Well, it’s basic _Game of Thrones_ shit, isn’t it? If you solidify your alliance with the other kingdom, then you can expand your own, which means more supplies and trade for your people, stronger forces during war, blah blah blah.”

Another cryptic smile. “Well, let’s now jump over this middle line and visit the other side of the spectrum, here. You said that it was the prince who was second-most guilty of the princess’s death. Why would that be?”

Josh threw his arms out to his sides, offering Hill a weary expression. “Isn’t it obvious?” 

“It’s not, and that’s why I’m asking you for your explanations.” 

He clucked his tongue and made a show of rolling his eyes. “Well…first and foremost, he’s a dick. A princely dick, sure, but a dick, nonetheless. See, the king didn’t know the princess didn’t want to marry the prince…the _prince_ sure knew, though. He _knew!_ He knew she didn’t want to marry him, he knew she wasn’t going to be happy about it, so what does he do? He sneaks around to the dad and goes ‘Psst, hey buddy, can I marry your daughter?’ Not exactly a cool move.”

“So am I correct in saying that the main difference you find between the king and the prince, then, in terms of their guilt, is that one _knew_ the princess would be upset, whereas the other _did not?_ ”

“I mean, that’s definitely _part_ of it, yeah. The king didn’t know marrying her to the prince would upset the princess. The _prince_ asked the king for her hand, knowing it would upset her. But still, the king had the entire kingdom to think about! The prince was just thinking about himself and what _he_ wanted. _He_ wanted to marry her, and that was all that mattered to him. He didn’t care about _her_ or her _feelings_ , just that he would get to _feel_ her, you get me?” 

“Oh, I get you,” Hill assured him. “I’m an _old_ man, Josh, not a dim one.” He flashed him another reassuring half-smile. “That just leaves one character, doesn’t it? It seems you found Princess Bellanne to be the guiltiest. And I have to say…I am a bit surprised that you placed her there.”

Eyes narrowing slightly, Josh looked over his choices again. “Level with me here, Alan. Do people really answer _differently_ than this? Like…do people _actually_ put them in orders other than this?”

“I think you’d be very, _very_ surprised at what other people say. But I’m not asking about other people, Josh, I’m asking about _you_. Why do you feel the princess was the most responsible for her own downfall?”

He glanced at the back of the statuette’s head, taking to drumming his fingers against his arm. “…are you gonna write down on that sheet that I’m victim-blaming if I say ‘She should’ve known better?’”

There was a quiet chortle from the other side of the desk. “I’m not here to _judge_ your answers, just _listen_ to them.”

“Then she should’ve known better. Look, I don’t care how upset she was—really, I don’t. Okay, she didn’t want to marry this guy and she didn’t want to bone down, I _get_ that. We’ve _all_ been there, right? But this was _her_ kingdom. She _knew_ that field was outside, and she _had_ to know the bull was there too! You said in the story that she _ignored_ the sign, meaning she knew it was there. I’m also gonna go out on a limb and assume she knew that bulls like to run at moving things, and that bulls are _usually_ not the friendliest members of the animal kingdom. She knowingly—and _willingly_ , I might add—threw herself into that situation. And yeah, the prince caused it, but she’s the one who _did_ the dang thing. So I stand by my first answer: She should’ve known better.”

“Hmm…” Hill said, staring down at his paper. “Hmm hmm hmm…well, I stand by what I said originally, as well: It was an interesting order, to be sure. But it raises an equally interesting follow-up question, I believe.” He set his pad down on the desk, delicately laying the pen on top of it. Lacing his fingers together, he leaned against his elbows, giving Josh an appraising look from the other side of the desk. “Is that _really_ how you feel, Josh? The reasons that you gave me, are you willing to stand by them?”

He wasn’t able to staunch his laughter at that. “Uh…yeah. I’m not going back on any of that. Well, not unless you change the plot, I guess. Maybe if you make it so the king picks the princess up and throws her off a cliff, or something. I gave you my final answer—that’s how I feel.”

Hill seemed to think that over, jaw working up and down as if he was chewing on something unseen. “And what if I _challenged_ those beliefs, hmm? What would you say then? Do you think I could persuade you to change this order?”

“What, you mean if you just told me I was wrong? I thought there weren’t right or wrong answers.”

“I’m not saying you’re _wrong_ , per se, but what if I said to you that _I_ thought the bull was the most guilty? It was his hooves, his weight that crushed the poor girl to death. The guilt should be his!”

Josh shook his head, chuckling again. “Nah, we’ve already been over this! It’s a dumb animal, and all it could _do_ was charge. Bulls charge. It didn’t want to hurt her, it didn’t mean to hurt her, it was just reacting out of instinct.” 

“Then perhaps someone should’ve blindfolded the bull before the wedding.” Acting as though he’d just won the debate, Hill raised both eyebrows, nodding definitively.

“What?” It…it wasn’t anything he’d been expecting to hear. Josh squinted at him, trying to work through what he’d just suggested. “I… _what?_ ”

Nonchalantly, Hill shrugged. “Perhaps someone should’ve made it common practice to blindfold the bull at night, don’t you think? If they did that, then there would be no worry about how he would or wouldn’t react if someone ran through the field.”

“I don’t…that isn’t the question, though.” Without realizing it, he’d straightened up in his chair, leaning his elbows against the desk in a mirror image of Hill’s posture. “ _You_ asked me if I thought the bull was guilty. I said no. You _never_ asked, or even mentioned in the story, anything about tying a hankie around this thing’s face every night. That’s…it’s not even a _point_. It’s just…why would anyone blindfold a bull?”

“To keep it from charging, of course.”

“That doesn’t make _any_ sense.”

The response didn’t appear to throw Hill off his game in the slightest. Instead, he changed his tack. “What if I said that I felt the princess was the _least_ responsible for her own death? That she couldn’t control her response, given how very distraught she was at the thought of having to wed and bed the p—”

That time, Josh didn’t let him finish. “No! We’ve been here already, too! And look, I _get_ the whole ‘making bad decisions when emotional’ thing. _Obviously_. I have made a shitty decision…or two, or three…while upset. We’re humans. That’s what we _do_. But she _knew_ the bull was there in the field. She _ignored_ it. I don’t care _how_ upset she was at the thought of dealing with His Royal Dick and his royal dick, she _threw herself_ at the bull. It’s her fault!”

“What if I said it was the _king_ who was the most responsible? That if it hadn’t been for his decision, this never would’ve happened? He simply shouldn’t have married her to the prince.”

“Then he would’ve made an enemy of the other kingdom, or at least like…he wouldn’t have had their support if he needed them. Also, he didn’t have the whole story! There was some important, _key_ info that man was missing. He _never_ could’ve made an informed decision based on what he had, and again Alan, he didn’t _want to hurt her_. The prince _did_.”

For a long, quiet moment, Hill watched him from across the desk. He didn’t say a word, didn’t move to write anything down, just scanned Josh’s face for God-knew-what. “So there’s nothing I can do to change your mind?” When he asked it that time, his voice had lowered and softened, something in his tone suggesting to Josh that they were nowhere near done with the exercise.

“Nope. Nothing.”

He continued to stare at Josh for a few seconds, eyes contemplative even as he reached up to scratch at a cheek. “All right. It is, of course, important for a man to be able to stand by his own opinions. That’s a gift, even if you don’t realize it, Josh—I think you’d be shocked to realize how very fluid some people can be when it comes to their own principles.” Picking the pad up again, he lowered his eyes from Josh. Making a few quick flourishes with his pen, Hill allowed the office to grow silent around them once more, nothing but the sound of their breathing filling the air. “I wonder though…do you think you would stand by those opinions if I changed the story?”

That time, he actually groaned. “The _plot?_ Yeah, I think I’d change my mind, actually, if the prince was suddenly…I don’t know, some machete-wielding psycho.”

Hill chuckled, “No, you misunderstand. I’m suggesting that perhaps I change a few…unimportant details. Peripheral details…the setting and such. For example, if it did _not_ take place in a castle.”

“Then…no. I wouldn’t care if it took place in the parking lot in the back of an Arby’s. My answers are gonna be the same.”

“Are you certain?” Hill didn’t raise his eyes, but Josh had the singular sensation he was being _observed_ , all the same. “Shall we try?”

One shoulder lifted and fell in a shrug. “Uh, okay? You’re gonna go through the whole thing again, except it’s not in a castle?”

“Well, I might as well change another unimportant detail or two while I’m at it. Hmm...earlier, you were _quite_ fixated on the characters having names, weren’t you? So how about we change their names, too? The names that I chose the first time around—admittedly—were somewhat odd, weren’t they?” He didn’t wait for Josh to agree or disagree. In one practiced move, Hill turned the paper strip back around so that the statues were all facing Josh again. “Now, let’s see if you can _really_ hold onto those beliefs, shall we?”

The corners of Josh’s mouth tightened. Part of him wanted to complain about the waste of time…until he remembered that it was _Bob_ paying for the appointments. Hill could tell him as many shitty stories as he wanted. “We shall.”

Clearing his throat once, Hill began the story again. “Once, on a beautiful, snowy mountain, there was a young woman named Hannah.”

Josh’s eyes widened to the size of dessert plates as he gaped up at Hill. “No,” he said flatly, pushing away from the desk. “No, that isn’t the _same_.”

Hill stopped the story immediately, returning to his hawk-like inspection of Josh’s face. “Precisely _how_ is it different, Josh?”

“It just _is!_ ”

Going quiet again, Hill waited a moment until Josh met his gaze. “I listened to the answers you gave me earlier. Now, I ask that _you_ listen to _me_ for just a minute. I recognize that this is a subject you prefer to avoid, Josh. Be that as it may, I think we can both agree that it’s one that _must_ be addressed, if you’re to heal from this loss.” He held his eyes for another beat, “This isn’t a punishment, and it isn’t a mockery. Sometimes, we get so…wrapped up in our own emotions, the noise in our own heads, that we find it difficult to see other perspectives, or consider what has happened in a more clinical, logical, _abstract_ way.

“I told you that I was going to test your beliefs, Josh, and that is exactly what I’m going to do. I won’t sit here and trudge through the story again, as I think we can both agree that would be redundant. I’m going to ask you to do precisely what you did before: Explain your decisions to me.” That time, he tapped the princess’s head first, the pen making a hollow clicking sound against statue. “Who do you feel is _most_ guilty of your sisters’ deaths, Josh?” 

“This is bullshit.” He stood jerkily from the chair, both hands raking through his hair. “Fuck this. It’s not the _same!_ These are…these are false equivalences! Your stupid princess story has _nothing_ to do with—”

In a voice so calm and so soft that Josh could only just barely hear it over the sudden rush of blood in his own ears, Hill spoke again. “A few minutes ago, you were very firm in your opinion that the princess was the most responsible for her own death. In your own words, you said that she ‘should’ve known better,’ that she ‘threw herself’ into the situation.”

He whirled, nostrils flaring. “That’s _not_ what happened with my sisters.”

Hill was silent. He simply watched Josh with that same inscrutable look, one leg crossed over the other, pen still occasionally tapping against the princess’s head.

“Hannah was… _humiliated_. Of course she ran!”

“Yet a moment ago, you said you ‘didn’t care _how_ upset the princess was.’ That her emotional upheaval was no excuse.” Still the same calm, rational voice. There wasn’t any accusation in his tone, and something about that fact positively drove Josh up the wall.

“Fine, whatever, it’s bullshit and wrong, but whatever. Let’s _assume_ it’s the same. It’s not, but let’s just _assume,_ okay? Beth was _concerned_. She _had_ to follow Hannah. _She_ wasn’t just acting on impulse, she—”

“It was her kingdom, Josh.” 

He froze where he stood, fingers still knotted in his hair. The way Hill had said it, the gentleness of his voice, caused him to rock back on his heels. When he’d stood from the desk, there’d been a flare of heat creeping up his chest and neck, a flare that Josh had taken for fury. As he stood there, staring at Hill, he recognized it for what it truly was.

 _Grief_.

“Your kingdom may not have been a castle…and perhaps there was no bull waiting for your sisters in some moonlit field. But your sisters knew the lodge, and they knew the grounds. They knew the dangers of those grounds. They knew there was a storm coming in. They knew they were charging into the unknown, into the night, into the storm. They knew all of that, Josh.”

His arms were beginning to feel numb. “It’s _different_.” He blinked hard, hoping Hill wouldn’t notice.

“While we’re still here on the guilty side of the board…let’s move to the prince. Of course, you didn’t have a prince, but from the story you’ve told me, it certainly sounds to me that there were players involved who intended to upset your sister.” Lowering his pen to the paper, Hill’s eyes seemed to scan his notes for something in particular. “I don’t believe _they_ require much explanation, though, do they? In all the time we’ve been talking, the part _they_ played doesn’t seem to factor into your anger or hurt. Perhaps because you considered them to be friends of your sisters, and not your own?” He looked up to Josh for only an instant before gesturing towards the empty chair. “Please.”

Josh eyed the chair, his agitation so thick he could almost taste it on the back of his teeth. He stood for a while longer, his own silent protest…and then sat. The arms of the chair were smooth and cool under his palms as he gripped them. Hill began to speak again in that same deceptively soothing voice, but Josh found he couldn’t wrench his attention away from the princess and her horribly wide, white, unseeing eyes.

“It’s the other side of the middle line that interests me the most…and quite honestly, I should hope it’s the side that interests _you_ the most as well. Once we cross this line, Josh, we make the switch from most to least—that isn’t to be confused with switching from guilty to innocent. Never once did I ask you who was _innocent_ in the story. _All_ of the players’ actions have consequences that they must reap, but that isn’t to say that all of their choices were equal in severity or gravity. Does that make sense to you?”

The longer he looked into the princess’s eyes, the blanker they felt. There was something building in his chest, making his organs feel too full, too fat. His sinuses ached with the memory of snow. “Are you about to tell me why I’m the king, in this situation?”

“I am not.” A rustling of paper suggested that Hill had set his notebook down, but Josh couldn’t look away to confirm it. “What I will remind you of, though, is that the reason you put the prince on _this_ side of the line, and the king on _this_ side of the line, was because the prince _intended_ to hurt the princess with his actions…and the king did not.”

Josh already suspected he wouldn’t like what Hill was about to follow that with.

“Of course, the king had _other_ reasons for doing what he did—isn’t that so? He wanted to earn the approval of the other kingdom, to bolster himself and _his_ kingdom, in their eyes. He also, as you pointed out, did not have the full story. He was lacking important information that made it _impossible_ for him to make the proper decision, when the time came.” Another rustle as Hill ostensibly leaned forward. “Neither Sam nor Ashley had all the information, Josh. They couldn’t have. Neither could’ve _possibly_ known how severely Hannah would react. It sounds to me as though Ashley very much wanted that _other_ kingdom’s approval. And it sounds to me as though Sam was only doing what _she_ thought was right. The intent was not there.” 

He chose not to respond. The insides of his cheeks were raw where he’d been biting at them, working the slick flesh between his molars until he could taste the first trace of blood.

“So that just leaves the bull, doesn’t it?” Hill picked up the small figurine then, inspecting it carefully before setting it back down on the square marked ‘LEAST.’ “No bulls up in the mountains, I know, but in my opinion, it’s safe to say that there _were_ two creatures up there who were utterly incapable of reacting any differently than they did. Two _very_ unconscious young men.” Hill paused for effect, but Josh didn’t so much as lift his gaze. “Just as we could never expect the bull to do anything _but_ run at the princess, so too would we be wrong to expect that either you or Chris could’ve done much of _anything_ to stop what happened.”

Whatever was working its way up his throat burned like acid. His mouth tasted like blood and cotton, the muscles numb, moving almost of their own accord. “…I was awake.” The admission stung his eyes, doubling then trebling his vision before he could blink it away. “Beth tried to get me up. I heard her. I could’ve…” His lips tightened. “I was awake.”

Hill had gone perfectly quiet as Josh spoke, his face impassive. When he finally spoke up again, the utter lack of surprise was enough to break Josh from his stupor. “Ah. Were you, now? Hmm. That certainly changes things, doesn’t it? So you were awake, you ignored your sisters, you _chose_ to remain where you were, and you didn’t _care_ what happened to them, then?” He watched as Josh’s forehead creased and uncreased, jaw working behind closed lips to find the right words. “There is a _very_ important distinction between ‘awake’ and ‘aware,’ Josh. If I remember the story correctly, and please believe that I do, you had been drinking quite excessively—while on your medication, no less. Do you know what happens when you mix Amitriptyline and alcohol, Josh?” He didn’t wait for him to respond, “ _I_ certainly do. Were you awake? Perhaps. Were you conscious enough to understand what was happening at the time? I find that doubtful. Even if you had, did you have the _physical_ wherewithal to react? Absolutely not. There was nothing you could’ve done.”

“I could’ve just…” And there was the flush in his face, the heat warning him that he was getting too close to losing it all. This wasn’t what he had expected. Hill should’ve been _disgusted_ with him, should’ve been shocked and horrified. He wasn’t supposed to be reassuring him, he wasn’t supposed to _justify_ his inaction. “I could’ve…I didn’t _have_ to drink, I could’ve—”

“Blindfolded the bull?” Hill suggested.

It was only then that Josh looked away from the princess and her sad, hollow eyes, finding Hill’s, instead. He could feel his throat working to swallow around the lump that had formed. Something hot, wet, and traitorous slipped down his cheek as he stared up at him.

Hill was indeed leaning on the desk, but he took a moment to clasp his hands in front of him as he hunkered down further. There was something unsettlingly comforting in his gaze as he lowered himself to Josh’s level, some nebulous breed of sympathetic understanding that suggested he, too, could feel the pangs of loss making Josh’s ribs vibrate around his guts. “ _Everyone_ made some terrible decisions that night. _Everyone_. But it is in our nature to make mistakes. ‘To err is human,’ and so on. And while I know you won’t appreciate me saying so, you and your friends are _young_ —so very _young_. It may not _feel_ that way to you now, and yet I assure you it’s true. You have long lives ahead of you, full of trial and error. Some of those errors will be costly, some will be horrible, but they will happen. Mistakes are an unavoidable part of being alive.

“What happened to your sisters? To Hannah and Beth? It was a tragedy, and a grave one at that…but nothing can change what happened. The past is beyond our control. All you can do now, all _anyone_ can do now, is work towards healing. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that will be an easy journey. It may, I’m afraid to say, be one of the hardest things you ever have to do. What I _will_ say is this: It appears to me, Josh, that you have friends who are trying very, _very_ hard to help you on that journey. It also appears to me that, with a notable exception or two, you have been doing _your_ best to push them away.”

Josh set his jaw, desperately fighting the urge to drop his eyes from Hill’s.

“We don’t pay much mind to slights acted out against us by strangers, or those we don’t like. If someone you disagree with insults you or questions your way of doing things, do you dwell on it? Probably not. It may sting for a moment, but then you push it from your mind. So how can it be that we behave so _differently_ when we feel that it is our _friends_ who have wronged us?” He tightened his mouth in the way that he had, the shape becoming something akin to a smile. “It makes _sense_ that you would be hurt by your friends’ actions that night, Josh. It makes _perfect_ sense. It is logical, it is intuitive, and it’s entirely explainable by basic psychological principles—it is simply how we are wired to react. What you need to remember is that just because your feelings are understandable, just because they are valid, does not necessarily mean that they are _correct_. The brain is a tricky thing. The heart, even trickier.”

A buzzing had begun in the back of his head, uncomfortable and discordant and strange. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like what Hill was saying. He didn’t like the slow spread of pins and needles marching their way down his extremities. He didn’t like how clear and obvious and _rational_ Hill’s point was.

Mostly, he didn’t like the princess’s hollow eyes watching him, accusing him of agreeing with Hill.

Accusing him of blaming her for her own death.

“Well, it looks like we’re out of time for this session,” Hill said, sounding leagues away. “Let’s get you back to your room, hmm?”

*******

**Saturday, May 3, 2014  
7:45pm**

“Do you think Sam’s okay? I was texting her earlier and she seemed…I don’t know, muted, or something.”

“Muted? Of all the words in the English language to describe a human being, you go with ‘ _muted?’_ ”

There was a rustle as Ashley readjusted herself, gathering up a few inches-worth of her dress to do so. “Ugh, you know what I _meant_.”

“I know what you meant, sure, but God, you gotta stop talking like an SAT prep book, Ash. You think that’s how you win friends in college? Cuz it’s not. Someone starts throwing synonyms at me, you know what I do?” 

“Break into hives and start sweating?” she offered dully, sticking her tongue out at him.

“Well, come on, that’s just how I react to _any_ social situation, so that guess wasn’t really _fair_.” Pulling into the parking lot, he groaned and stopped, waving a gaggle of prom-goers across. “I’m sure Sam’s fine. She’s got finals coming up, that’s all.”

Ashley frowned, fingers absently toying with the intricate braid woven into her up-do. “It felt like more than that, though. I think she’s still really upset about Josh bailing to be with his dad. Must be hard…I know he’s like…the _one_ person who knows the twins as well as her, so…” she let her voice trail off, not entirely sure how she wanted to end that particular thought. 

Once everyone had skittered by, he managed to pull into a space. “Ah, yeah, that. Well, honestly, it’s probably more the Blackwood stuff than anything el—”

As though her head were on a swivel, she snapped her gaze to him, searching his face. “What Blackwood stuff?”

Chris winced and he shifted into park. “Oh, I should _not_ be telling you this.”

“Uh huh, well, too bad that you’re already halfway into it, then.” Her seatbelt clicked and she pivoted in her seat to better face him, eyes wide with intrigue. “What Blackwood stuff? Come on! What do you know that I don’t?”

In the back of his head, Josh’s voice echoed judgmentally. ‘ _What do I think you told Ash?’_ he’d asked in the dorm room, _‘Everything_.’ Chris had tried so _hard_ to prove him wrong on that count, and yet there he was…He looked over to her with a heavy sigh, “It’s gonna gross you out.”

“It will _not!_ ”

“It will, though.”

“Oh my _God_ , the more you lead on with stuff like that, the more I _need_ to know—just _tell_ me, already.”

He gnawed on his lip for a second before biting the bullet and diving right in. “Sooo…they found a body up by the lodge.”

Ashley gasped, her interest immediately tempered by shock. “A _body?_ ”

“Yeah. Not one of the girls, though…it was some rando, go figure. Sam heard the news report and told Josh—”

“Oh _no_ …”

“And it’s just…man, it sounds like a _real_ clusterfuck up there.”

“Do they think…” she paused, mulling over her next words carefully. “It’s related to Hannah and Beth? Or…?” Her fingers buzzed with an excited dread that was hard to parse until it all clicked into place; between the fancy clothes, the people walking past the car windows, and the frankly upsetting subject matter…it felt a lot like they were back in the parking lot of the funeral home, waiting to go in and face the Washingtons.

He shrugged, letting his hands fall onto his lap. “I don’t know—like, for real, I don’t. Sam didn’t think so, at least. But I’ll tell ya, Ash, after she told me, I did some digging online, and _oofa doofa_ , the details are. Upsetting.” Undoing his seatbelt, he began the mental exercise of trying to decide what was too much to tell her. “They had to use _dental records_ to ID him.”

Her cringe was somehow audible. “Ugh, ew, usually that means…there wasn’t much _left_. If that was the only way to identify him, then…ugh.” She was beginning to regret asking for the details, after all (not that wild horses would be able to drag _that_ truth from her). 

“Yeah. Yeah, believe me. I know.”

“That’s just so _sad._ He must’ve been out there for a while…Was it an animal, do they know? I know Josh said there are wolves up there…”

Chris had thought (really and truly) that he had been doing a particularly good job of controlling his face. As far as he was concerned, he was wearing a stony mask of indifference and nonchalance, affected by _nothing_. But apparently that wasn’t the case. When he glanced over to Ashley, her apprehension was evident. “What?”

“Oh my God, you don’t think it was wolves.”

“I mean, to be fair, it very well _could’ve been_ wolves—” 

“Oh no, oh no no no, no you don’t. Don’t lie to me—why don’t you think it was wolves?” She leaned closer to him, her hands supporting her weight on the center console. “What could _possibly_ make you think it wasn’t wolves? There must be _something_ , otherwise you would’ve just said ‘Yeah,’ and we’d be done. So what—”

He groaned, covering his face with his hands. “Ash, _puh-lease_.” She didn’t answer, but he could feel her eyes burning holes through him, all the same. “Look. I just…think…that it’s…possible…maybe something _else_ did it.”

“Something else like what? Like a _person?_ ” Her voice shrank to a whisper as she said it, as though there was any danger of them being overheard. In that moment, she realized what sort of a scene they must’ve been making for anyone walking past the car. She was immediately and painfully aware of how close she’d leaned into Chris, and took a moment to covertly settle back into her seat.

“No! Not a person, Jesus. Like a…like maybe a bear.”

All plans disregarded, she leaned in close again. “What… _specifically_ …makes you think…it could be a bear?”

That was _definitely_ going to be a line-crosser. _For sure_. That was bar-none, unquestionably, no ifs, ands, or buts, _too much_ to tell Ashley. But she was staring at him so intently, and he felt his resolve crumble into pieces. Chris winced again, teeth bared in a grimace. “Well. Uh. Remember how I said they needed to use…dental records?”

“I do. It was thirty seconds ago.”

“Well, um. When they found his body, it had _definitely_ been eaten." 

“Okay.”

“But even if it _hadn’t_ been eaten, they would’ve needed the dental records.”

“…okay…”

“Because it took them a while to… _find_ his body.”

Her eyes flit downwards as she thought. Chris could all but see the gears turning in her head, could almost hear the _Jeopardy!_ theme accompanying her mad scramble to piece it together. Surprisingly enough, Ashley seemed stumped; she looked back to him cautiously. “I don’t follow.”

Chris made a low, hesitant humming sound, still obviously uncomfortable. Without saying another word, he dragged his thumb across the base of his throat, sealing the deal by letting his head flop sideways onto his shoulder. 

_“WHAT?!_ ”

“Ugh, see? See?! I knew I shouldn’t’ve told you! Fuck.”

“His _head_ was _somewhere else?!_ ”

His shoulders slouched helplessly as he melted into a boneless puddle in the driver’s seat. “His head was somewhere else.”

“Oh my _GOD!_ ”

“It was by the guest cabin.”

“ _Oh my GOD!_ ”

“Not like, _in_ the guest cabin, or sitting out on the porch, or anyth—why am I still talking?” he asked the air. “Why the fuck am I still talking?”

Ashley had both of her hands at her mouth, knuckles pressed hard against her lips. “Sam told Josh that there was a _headless guy_ found at the guest cabin?” Above her hands, her eyes were wide with scandalized horror.

“No— _no!_ ” Chris waved his own hands frantically. “ _No_. God no. Sam just told him they found a body and it _wasn’t_ one of the twins. No one knows about the other stuff except me.”

“And _me_ ,” she added fervently, pulling her shoulders inward as though she were trying to shrink herself out of existence. “Oh my _God_ , Chris, _oh my God_.”

“God, I shouldn’t have told you. I should’ve just said ‘Aw I dunno Ash! Sam’s probably fine. Maybe it’s lady troubles!’ But no. Nope. Gotta just…run my mouth.”

She whirled back on him, caught between intrigue and horror. “No! I _had_ to know!”

“You didn’t! You really didn’t.”

“I did! Now I know not to like…bring it up in front of anyone. And— _and_ —now _you_ don’t have to sit there, consumed by this…horrible knowledge by yourself.” A flicker of movement caught her eye, and she quickly looked out the window before turning back to find Chris staring at her disbelievingly. “…what?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Are you…are you already turning this into some weird novel in your head?”

“ _No!_ ”

A pause.

“I’m _not!_ ” She rolled her eyes with a groan, getting out of the car once Chris did. “…it could’ve been a badger.”

“… _what?_ ”

With the good grace enough to look abashed, she mumbled, “Badgers don’t…eat the heads of their prey.”

He blinked at her. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah. A badger. I’m sure…I’m sure it was a badger, Ash.”

“Or like…a wolverine, maybe. Badgers are…small…”

“How about we talk about something a little more, uh…” Chris watched as another group of people walked past them. “ _Family friendly?_ ”

“ _You’re_ the one who brought it up.”

“Uh yeah, only after you _forced_ me to.”

“Oh, I _forced_ you, huh? That’s the story you’re gonna go with?”

He flapped his hand in a ‘blah blah blah’ gesture before reaching into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulling out his phone. “You’re the one who brought _badgers_ into it. For real though, check it—I got the evening’s entertainment.”

Unimpressed, Ashley glanced down to the screen. “Nothing makes a girl feel more special than her prom date texting the night away.”

They made it through the bottleneck at the front doors of the reception hall easily enough, but he waited until they were out of earshot of anyone else to try again. “Nah, look…it’s school dance bingo. Made it myself,” he added, beaming.

“It’s…what?” That time, she took his phone from him, zooming in on the image displayed. It appeared to be a shoddily drawn bingo card thrown together in MS Paint, the lines nowhere near straight, none of the text boxes matching, everything written in neon green Comic Sans. “This is what gives you migraines,” she said bluntly. “Looking at disgusting things like this is what gives you headaches.”

He feigned insult, gasping loudly. “Do you have any idea how many _hours_ I slaved over that, Ashley? Like…it took me _so_ long.”

“And you _could’ve_ been studying for your finals.”

“Yeah!” he agreed, all enthusiasm. “I _could’ve!_ But I _didn’t_. For the sake of my _art_.” Near the end of the sentence, his voice dropped into British accent so terrible that a couple of nearby students turned and scowled. “But if you’re done ragging on it, how ‘bout you give it a little look-see?”

“Okay. Prom bingo, huh? Let’s see what you…geez, the neon green is hard to read.”

“Yes it is!”

“This is…okay, ‘Guy who shows up in cargo shorts and Converses to be edgy.’” She thought it over for a second before shrugging. “Yeah, all right, that one’s fair. Usually a couple of those. Uh…‘Emo kids hanging out by the wall because dancing is lame.’” Making a noise, she looked up to him, “That one feels like a personal jab.”

“Oh come on. You were never _emo_. You tried—my God, you _tried_ —but bless you, you just couldn’t get a hold of the whole glitter thing.”

“‘Girls trying to get their picture taken with the one cute teacher chaperone,’” she continued to read, unable to stop from laughing. “‘Dude who showed up blackout drunk.’ ‘Two people having an incredibly serious conversation in the hallway outside of the dance.’ Wow. That one’s…specific.”

Chris leaned over her shoulder, tapping one square in particular. “That one’s my fave.”

“‘Someone passes out from dehydration and the EMTs show up?’ What kind of dances have _you_ been to? Oh, and there’s ‘Girl crying in the bathroom…’ I like that the free space is ‘The Cha-Cha Slide,’ that’s good.”

“What can I say? I’m a genius.”

“You’re _something_ , all right. What’s the prize if you get bingo?”

“Uh…huh. Bingo usually has a prize, doesn’t it? Hmm. Maybe the real prize is…the friendships we made along the way?” 

“I am absolutely regretting coming to this dance with you.”

The first hour or so passed uneventfully enough. The ballroom was dark and packed and too hot, regardless of how far from the dance floor one was; within maybe fifteen minutes, there were already people sitting and fanning themselves, suit jackets and shrugs tossed aside to drape on the backs of chairs. It was organized chaos at its finest, piles of high-heeled shoes growing around the borders of the dance floor, people shouting over the speakers to get their friends’ attention, made all the worse by some of the most terrible dancing ever seen in the history of humankind.

Every so often, they’d bump into someone from Ashley’s Creative Writing group, or a classmate, and they’d smile and laugh and pose for the selfies like everyone else. Neither would be able to say why, or even _when_ , but it wasn’t long before both of them realized they were…anxious? Worried? There wasn’t really a _word_ for the way their teeth had been set on edge. It was almost as though they were waiting for the other shoe to drop…but they’d missed the first shoe entirely. Sure, it was loud, it was crazy, and big social events had never really been their thing…this was something else. When Ashley felt a tap on her shoulder and turned around to find herself face-to-face with Matt, it fell into place. 

Loud music, shouting, and bad news about a body near the lodge.

“Hey! Matt!” She managed to smile in an attempt to shake off the uncomfortable prickles of déjà vu creeping their way up her spine.

“I almost didn’t recognize you! With the—with your hair being up!” Matt laughed, waving a hand around his own head to illustrate. He seemed to spot Chris as an afterthought, nodding halfheartedly in greeting. “Hey.”

Chris gave him a quick two-finger salute. “Hey man.”

Matt leaned in closer to be heard over the noise. “You haven’t seen Jess, have you?” there was laughter in his voice as he asked it, but Ashley was close enough to see the beginnings of concern in his eyes. “A bunch of us’re supposed to take some pictures together, and she just sort of, I dunno, disappeared?”

She shook her head, tightening her mouth into a line. “We haven’t! Um…” Between the strobing lights and the sheer number of people, the ballroom appeared to be nothing more than a sea of heads. “I can definitely keep an eye out for her, though!”

“Cool, cool…” Matt looked around the room again, to no avail. “I mean, she’s probably gonna show up, you know she never misses a photo opp.” He glanced over his shoulder as if hearing someone trying to get his attention, turning back to the two of them for only a second. “Well, whatever. Thanks, Ash! Catch you around.”

“Yup.” Whether or not he could hear her over the buzz of the room was uncertain.

“Oooh, drama-llama. Wanna know the good news about that? ‘Person desperately trying to find their friend,’ is absolutely one of the bingo squares.” Chris chuckled even as Ashley nudged him with her elbow. “She probably got distracted by something shiny—they’ll find her in five minutes, fawning over her own reflection.”

“You’re _so_ mean. _So_ mean.”

He smirked, the screen of his phone reflected in his glasses as he crossed off a bingo square. “You’re laughing, though.”

“What _ever_.” The pit of uneasiness in her stomach had let up slightly, reverting to run-of-the-mill social anxiety. Ashley rubbed at the back of her neck, very aware of how hot she was, in that moment. “Ugh. I’m gonna go get a drink and splash some water on my face, it’s an _oven_ in here…you want me to get you some water?”

He waved it off. “Nah, I’m good. Just gonna hang back and people-watch. Hey…” Chris pointed an accusatory finger her way. “Don’t get lost.”

“Ha ha.” Weaving her way through the crowd was a challenge, but the relative coolness of the hallway was more than its own reward. In the quiet of the reception hall’s entrance area, her ears felt like they’d been packed full of cotton balls. It was ridiculous how greatly a little quiet and light could affect her mood. She bypassed the water coolers in search of the restroom, making a point to avoid looking at the pair having a hushed, somber conversation in a nearby alcove; she made a mental note to tell Chris, for the good of his stupid bingo card.

The restroom was bizarrely far from the ballroom, down its own narrow, spooky hallway. As she turned the corner, following one of the many signs lining the path, a few girls pushed past her, muttering unhappily amongst themselves.

In retrospect, she probably should’ve taken that as a sign in its own right—people hurrying _away_ from the bathroom. But she was hot and tired, and more than just slightly disoriented from dealing with so many people in such a small space, so…she didn’t. Ashley pulled the door to the bathroom open with a sigh, walking up to the line of sinks and turning on one of the taps to get some cool water going.

…in retrospect, she probably should’ve noticed the crying. _But_ …she was hot and tired, her ears still ringing with the ghost of the Hot 100 pop songs the DJ had been blasting, so…she didn’t.

“Oh my _fucking God!_ ” A furious voice rang out from one of the stalls (likely the only one with the door shut), startling her badly enough to actually yell out. “I said _get out!_ Who the _fuck_ is that?!”

If it was possible for a human being to cringe themselves out of existence, Ashley came about as close as anyone had ever gotten. Every inch of her was _screaming_ to turn around and scurry back out into the hallway, but she could sense the other person was _waiting_ for her to answer. She was caught. “Um…A-Ashley?” she said, wondering if her voice was loud enough to be heard at all. “Ashley Brown?”

There was silence. Her hands anxiously smoothed at the sides of her dress while she waited for _any_ sort of response. Without warning, the stall door swung open with a horrendous screech.

In the mirror, Ashley watched a very rumpled Jessica Riley emerge, her face streaked with dark mascara tears.

So at least that was _one_ mystery solved.

She was rendered perfectly, stupidly motionless until Jessica joined her at the row of sinks. Only once Jessica leaned towards the mirror to get a good look at herself did Ashley seem to regain control of her body. “Ohmygosh,” she breathed, turning to her, “Are you…is…um.” The words were thick on the tip of her tongue, but she knew the answer before even asking. “Are you okay?” 

Jessica barked a high, shrill laugh, yanking down a handful of paper towels from the wall dispenser. “I’m _great!_ ” She wet the handful of towels under the tap before squeezing them out, beginning the process of carefully wiping away the dark tracks running down her cheeks. “I mean, what’s _not_ to love about tonight, right? Who _doesn’t_ love prom?”

Ashley realized with no small amount of concern that she was still crying, even as she actively scrubbed at her face. She turned away, so as not to stare, instead glancing at their reflections. The difference between the two of them was staggering—even with her makeup running, Jessica looked like Prom Night Barbie, her hair curled and tumbling to her bare shoulders, her dress a strapless wisp of pink and white tulle, somehow managing to maintain her aura of down-home glamor despite her tears; on the other hand, with her hair pinned back, her makeup dark and her dress’s halter neck leaving nothing but her arms uncovered, Ashley looked more like an off-brand American Girl doll playing dress-up. Only adding to the strangeness of it was the way the bright fluorescent overhead lights combined with the cottony, faraway sound of the dance to give the bathroom a vaguely surreal feeling, like the two of them were standing in the middle of a daydream.

Wadding the mass of paper towels into a ball and positively _slamming_ them into the trashcan, Jessica glanced down to fumble with a handbag hanging from her wrist. “Best night of my life!” The bag opened with a quiet _snap_ , Jessica swearing loudly when her phone tumbled out and clattered to the floor. “Oh _fuck_ this! Fuck it! Here, can you just…” she slid her hand out of the strap around her clutch, holding it out to Ashley.

Stumbling over a few words, Ashley took it. Under normal circumstances, she would’ve been sorely tempted to take a peek at whatever was inside…but this was _Jessica_. She averted her eyes as politely as she knew how, waiting wordlessly while she retrieved her phone from the ground. When Jessica stood back up, Ashley offered it up to her, surprised when she didn’t outright take it back, but instead reached inside. Not one to argue, she kept it held out to her as she rifled through for whatever it was she needed.

Jessica pulled an eyeliner pencil out of the clutch, moving with well-practiced ease as she tugged the skin of her cheek just slightly and fixed the smudges on her waterline. “Know what’s the best?” With her eyes on the mirror, it felt much more like she was talking to herself than Ashley. “Just like…the absolute _best?_ The best thing _ever_ is when you like…think everything’s _totally fine_ between you and someone, and then they totally freaking _screw you over_. But you’re a nice person! And super forgiving! So you just…let it go.” She switched to her other eye, pausing only long enough to clean the first line up. “You let it go, and you think things are like, totally chill and fine…” Jessica dropped the eyeliner back into the clutch and sightlessly managed to grab a tube of mascara instead, setting about touching up what she had cried off. “And you _think_ everyone’s gonna be cool! And maybe they’ll put on their big girl panties and be an _adult_ for once! And _then_ they grab a big ol’ knife, and they _stab you in the back_ over and over and over again, not _caring_ about whether or not _you’re_ hurt or how _you’re_ doing, because ha! Why would any of that matter?! And then…just when you think they’re done stabbing you— _SURPRISE!_ They pick that knife right back up and _start doing it all over again!_ ”

At the first spike of Jessica’s voice, Ashley had recoiled by an inch or so, instinctively moving away from the fury radiating off of her; it proved to be a good call. She watched as Jessica bit off a strained, choked noise that could’ve been a swallowed scream. The fist still wrapped around the mascara tube slammed down against the sink in three rapid punches that sounded too loud, too _meaty_ to not be painful. There was a clatter when Jessica threw the mascara at the mirror, sending it bouncing back towards one of the empty stalls, hitting a closed door and falling impotently to the ground. Eyes wide, Ashley caught a glimpse of her own reflection in her periphery, snapping her mouth shut so Jessica wouldn’t see her gaping.

Not that there was much risk of that happening, of course. From where she was standing, hands grasping either side of the sink, head hung over the basin, all Jessica was likely to see was the drain. “It’s. _The best_ ,” she repeated. Then, in one quick, jerking motion, she whipped her head back upright, shaking her hair out primly. She fixed the placement of a curl or two before taking her clutch back from Ashley, snapping it shut and sliding the strap around her wrist again. “Only the _best_ from _my_ bestie,” she muttered, voice barely loud enough to be heard over the buzz from the ballroom. 

“Um.” It was only one Jessica turned to look at her that Ashley realized she had said it aloud. “Oh, uh. I…” she floundered, feeling her face heat up with each passing second she couldn’t quite get her mouth to cooperate. “I don’t want to like…um…overstep or anything…” Why was she talking? There was no way in hell that _Jessica Riley_ , of all people, needed advice from _her_ —but her mouth wouldn’t stop moving. “I don’t know the…circumstances, or whatever, but…if someone like…went out of their way to make you _this_ upset tonight—I mean, when they _knew_ you were going to be out and having fun and all that, um…maybe they’re not…that great of a friend?”

Jessica had been in the middle of yanking her dress back up under her arms when Ashley said it. She stopped moving, fingers still curled around the fabric of her dress, fixing her with a look that was equal parts surprised and suspicious.

It was the sort of look, Ashley thought, that suggested she had only just remembered she was talking to an ‘Almost.’ No sooner had _that_ thought occurred to her than she felt the color drain from her face. Like a domino falling into another, it had triggered a sudden, intense memory of the conversation at her dining room table—Jessica wasn’t the _only_ one who’d come up with the name for their little group. 

Her stomach filled with a frantic, terrified swarm of butterflies as she realized the person Jessica had been talking about (the person that she, herself, had just insulted) was absolutely, undeniably, irrefutably, Emily.

After what felt like an eternity, Jessica tugged her dress into place. “You know what?” She didn’t give Ashley a chance to stutter through a response, “Maybe you’re right.” One more pass of her hair, one more once-over in the mirror, a deep breath, and then Jessica righted herself, straightening her posture. The effect was immediate: once more, she was radiant, showing no signs of what had happened only a few minutes ago.

To Ashley, it was astounding. The fact that Jessica could snap out of it so quickly, so _completely_ , was on par with a Las Vegas magic trick; when _she_ cried, there wasn’t enough mascara in the _world_ to cover it up. Still seized with the implacable feeling that she was caught in a hallucination of sorts, she watched in the mirror as Jessica smoothed her dress out and sashayed her way to the bathroom door.

At the last moment, hand pressed against the door, Jessica turned back. Giving her that same thoughtful look, a corner of Jessica’s mouth turned up. “Thanks, by the way.”

And then she was gone, the door swinging shut behind her, leaving Ashley alone in front of the sinks.

She blinked in the wake of it all, stomach in knots, ears buzzing, having completely forgotten why she’d come into the bathroom in the first place. Ashley awkwardly turned in place as though to reassure herself no one else had witnessed the interaction, the low heels of her shoes clicking dully in the empty room. 

The door swung open again as one, then two, then three girls stumbled in, raucously laughing at some joke. Ashley slipped out into the calm of the hallway, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. She walked back to the ballroom, keeping a good couple of yards between herself and Jessica.

“Oh damn, you actually found her, huh?” Chris’s laugh tapered off when Ashley got close enough for him to see her expression. “What?”

Glancing over her shoulder to make sure Jessica was well out of earshot, she shook her head. “She was _crying_ in the _bathroom_.”

For a moment Chris said nothing. Then he pulled his phone out and tapped one of the bingo squares, never breaking eye contact with her.

“Oh come _on!_ ” She pressed her fingers to her temples, the music around them suddenly _unbearably_ loud, the room _unbearably_ full. “Are you gonna be upset if we bail?” she asked, the sea of people around them making her incredibly dizzy. “I’m just…really not feeling this, all of a sudden.”

“Oh, thank Christ, I didn’t want to be the one to say it. I am _down_ to dip.”

The relief between them was palpable. Short of running, they made their way out into the parking lot as quickly as possible, the evening air amazingly cool compared to the sweltering dance floor.

The apartment was dark when they opened the front door, save for a lamp in the living area. There was a quiet snort as Charlie the pug lifted his head from his spot on the couch and blinked dolefully up at them before curling up again. Ashley wasted no time in getting out of her shoes, balancing herself against the back of one of the dining room’s chairs to undo the straps.

“What a _magical_ evening!”

She blew an errant strand of hair out of her face, exhaling a cloud of tension that had been clogging her chest the _moment_ her bare feet hit carpet. “Sorry for being a cruddy prom date.” The look she gave him as she passed by wasn’t terribly apologetic, though. Like a moth drawn to a flame, she made a beeline for one kitchen cabinet in particular, standing on her tiptoes to nudge a few mugs away. Her fingers scrabbled around, feeling for something unseen at the very back of the cabinet.

“Apology accepted. You know, most girls would be _honored_ to—what are you doing?” He paused mid-joke ( _and_ mid-jacket removal), raising an eyebrow as he watched her struggle. Ashley didn’t respond except to grunt in effort, and he was left to laugh when it occurred to him. “Jamie is going to _murder you_ if she finds out you’ve been in her stash, Ash.” Chris stopped again, a self-satisfied smile curling its way across his face. “Stash-Ash,” he muttered, “Ash-stash.”

The paper wrapper didn’t stand a chance. Ashley tore it off and crinkled it up in her hand, letting it fall onto a countertop. She took a bite big enough to pose a real choking hazard, exhaling another relieved sigh through her nose. “Man, _fuck_ Jamie,” she shot back, her voice thickened by the chunk of chocolate in her mouth.

Despite his grin, Chris gasped loudly enough to startle Charlie off the couch. “ _Ashley!_ ” he jokingly admonished, accepting the chocolate bar when it was offered to him. “Language.”

She rolled her eyes over to him, pulling a face. Primly, she moved a hand in front of her mouth, covering the worst of it while she talked and chewed. “Jamie didn’t hear about any headless guys, today.”

“Well, not that you know about.” He bit off one of the bar’s segments before reaching over and pulling one of the chairs out from the table for Ashley. “I mean, what if she heard about _two_ headless guys, comes back here, and realizes her stash is gone?”

“She’ll live.” She plucked the chocolate back from him, taking another bite. “Like…this was all just…weird. The dead guy, Josh not being around, the whole thing. Everything just feels _weird._ I’d really appreciate it if things could stop being weird. Just for like. A week.”

“Join us next week, ladies and gents, for another inspiring episode of ‘Words of Wisdom With Ashley Brown.’” He spread his hands out in a dramatic arcing motion. “Hey, I told you we should’ve done the Avril Lavigne thing, just shown up in band t-shirts and those pants with all the straps, riding skateboards and stickin’ it to the man. But you…” he took the chocolate back, “Didn’t _like_ that idea.”

Almost without realizing what she was doing, Ashley had begun feeling around her hair, pulling bobby pins out one at a time. “And I feel so _bad_ for Jess—” Chris snorted derisively and she scowled in return, “You weren’t _there!_ She was _so_ upset. And on prom night, too! It was sad.”

“Please, _please_ …don’t be sad for her. Okay? Please? High school is _specifically_ set up for people like her to rule with an iron fist. An iron fist with a French manicure, sure, but iron nonetheless. I think she can _handle_ having a rough night.”

“You really don’t like her.” It was a statement, not a question, Ashley accepting the chocolate from him again.

Chris rolled his eyes and settled back into his chair with his arms folded across his chest. “She’s definitely not my bestie. She’s also not bae _or_ boo, for what it’s worth—though honestly, I’m still not sure what the difference between those two things is. But you gotta remember here, I’m what the kids these days would call a ‘nerd,’ or a ‘dork,’ or ‘bad with social cues,’ so it shouldn’t really be too much of a surprise.” He put his feet up on one of the other chairs to make himself more comfortable, but fixed her with a jokingly contemplative stare. “I think the _real_ question here is why _you_ seem to like her at all. Honestly, it’s pretty weird.”

It was Ashley’s turn to roll her eyes. “She’s nice.” When Chris made another sound of disbelief, she tried again. “Is it really that hard to believe? She’s…I don’t know, charming! _Everyone_ likes her, she’s crazy popular. She was Homecoming Queen!”

“There is _such_ a difference between being popular and people actually liking you. She’s popular. If people liked her, she wouldn’t have spent prom alone in the bathroom, sobbing.”

Scoffing, she gave her head one last cursory pat, not finding anymore hidden pins. “People liking you is the _definition_ of popularity.”

“Nope. Incorrect. They’re very separate things. I’ll take that shit to my grave. Jess is _popular_ , but people—” Chris cocked in eyebrow in what was meant to be a suave manner, gesturing to himself, “—such as _moi_ , do not like her. Now, take _me_ for another example. I’m _not_ popular by any stretch of the imagination, but people _love_ me.”

That got an actual laugh. “Oh yeah? Name five.”

“Ouch… _ouch!_ Well _you_ like me. That counts for _something_ , doesn’t it? Even if, admittedly, your taste in people is apparently _the worst_.”

“She’s just…she’s so _pretty_. And always put-together. People _want_ to be around her, they like…want to hang out with her for reasons other than hoping she’ll do all the work on group projects for them.”

Grimacing, he took the chocolate. “Aw man, I didn’t realize this was gonna be an episode of Dr. Phil. You wanna talk about high school, Ash? You…you wanna talk about the difficulties of being the smart kid?” He took a sizeable bite, hoping it would make what he said next harder to hear. “And shut up, _you’re_ pretty.”

It did _not_ make him too difficult to hear. Ashley raked a hand through her hair, trying and failing to keep from smiling too widely. “Yeah, well…her boobs are _so_ much bigger than mine.”

Silence.

Chris looked over from the chocolate bar, cocking his head to the side as he caught her gaze. “…oh, I’m sorry, were you hoping I was going to say something about that? Nuh-uh. No way. Nope. Sorry Ash, I might be an idiot, but I’m not an idiot with a death wish. Not touching _that one_.”

She giggled tiredly before stifling a yawn. “Oh well. A girl can try.”

“Aw man, not to change the _super great_ subject, but the bad news just keeps coming,” Chris said, looking down at his phone with an expression that could only be described as consternation. 

Ashley felt her stomach start to wind itself up into a gnarled knot. She leaned in closer, trying to see what he was looking at. “Why? What happened?”

He sighed before turning his phone so that she could get a better look at the screen. “Turns out I _just_ missed getting a bingo.”

She didn’t even _pretend_ to read the screen, groaning loudly as she shoved his hand away. “Oh my _God_ , I thought something _serious_ happened! Don’t _do_ that!”

“Something serious _did_ happen! I was so close! Look!” Chris was doing his best to restrain his laughter, pointing at the makeshift bingo card. “Ash, no—wait—look, just look! See, if you go this way, diagonal, I was _so_ close! Cuz look, look, we got…girl crying in bathroom! Jess, right? So that’s one. Someone who was _clearly_ blackout drunk—you saw that guy, right? Were you in the bathroom for that? Then there’s the free space, they played the Cha-Cha Slide, because like, _of course_ they did…and then…” He stopped as he realized the scathing glare he was receiving from the other side of the table. “Ashley. Can you _please_ take this seriously?” He turned back to his phone, “Because _then_ , there were those guys who got into the fight but never actually threw any punches.”

The chocolate bar was nearing its end. Ashley bit off another section, chewing at it absently while watching Chris gesture madly at his phone. Despite herself, she sighed and scooted her chair across the floor so that she was next to him again, setting her chin against his shoulder to get a better look at the screen. “So what did we miss?” she asked, offering him the bar.

“Oh, so now it’s _‘we,’_ huh?” Without thinking about it, he leaned over and took a bite of the chocolate while Ashley held it. “ _We_ missed spotting a ‘Couple slow dancing to a song wildly inappropriate for slow dancing.’”

“Why did you make so many that were _that_ specific?” She sucked a breath through her teeth, taking another bite. “Hmm…We _did_ bail before anyone really had a chance to get into the groove, didn’t we?”

“We sorta did.” He stared at his phone for a moment longer before shaking his head. “Ah well. B-I-N-G- _no_ , I guess. Maybe next time.”

“…next time? What _next time?_ ” Ashley laughed and set the last few squares of chocolate down, folding her arms atop the table. “You realize there _are_ no more school dances, right? Like. That was it.”

“Oh. Right. Well. Fuck.”

She was still laughing to herself even as she stood from her chair. “Well…I guess that means there’s only one thing to do.”

“What’s that?” he asked, warily watching her stand up.

“Find a song.”

He blinked up at her, not quite understanding. “Uh? You got a request, or…?”

“Yeah, something…what did you say? ‘Wildly inappropriate for slow dancing.’” She offered him her hand, doing a poor job of hiding her grin. “Come _on_ , before I change my mind,” she said when Chris made no immediate moves to get up from his chair.

Tentatively, he set his phone down, staring at Ashley’s hand and then back up at her, as though weighing his options. “Okay, okay, I got one!” Chris held up a finger, signaling for her to wait while he scrolled through his phone, brow furrowed. He settled on a song, tapping the screen before sliding his hand into hers, allowing her to help him to his feet.

There was an awkward moment of fumbling as both of them tried to figure out where to put their hands. The end result was some uncomfortable reproduction of the middle school version of slow dancing, arms straight, with roughly a football field’s length between them.

“God, what did you _pick?_ Why won’t it just start?”

“Hey, give it a sec, okay? I ripped it off YouTube, so it’s probably gonna take—”

The first two notes of the song rang out, tinny from the phone’s speakers, and Ashley groaned so loudly that Charlie barked from the other room. “Are you kidding? _Are you kidding?_ ” She rolled her eyes up at Chris and his cheesy grin.

“Wildly inappropriate, right?”

She had to give him _that_ —if there was any one song on Earth that wasn’t meant for slow dancing, it was certainly that one. “Whatever,” she sighed, the sound trailing off into a laugh as the kitchen filled with the discordant screeching of _What Does the Fox Say?_. “Anything for bingo, I guess.”

And it was hard to say how or when or why, but by the time Ylvis began questioning how a fox could ever talk to a horse, their stiff-armed postures had melted away to something else, the two of them swaying to the song like it was some sad, slow waltz. Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe emotional whiplash, maybe some combination of the two; Ashley tucked her chin against Chris’s shoulder, Chris set his atop Ashley’s head, and it was a long while before they realized the song had ended. 

***

 **Wednesday, May 7, 2014  
2:11pm**

The day was overcast, the sun cloaked behind clouds dark with the promise of rain. It made Hill’s office seem unbearably spooky, the usual rays of light replaced by the unnatural yellow glow of overheads. It made the colors appear more saturated than they were, which made Josh’s eyes ache in turn. He’d been sleeping better, that much was for sure, and for the most part he was _feeling_ better, but ‘better’ was not ‘perfect.’ ‘Better’ was still not ‘well.’

“You cannot— _cannot_ —simply decide to stop taking this medication like you did with the Amitriptyline.”

“I know, I…I know.” Josh had the good sense to look rueful at that, anxiously scrubbing at his mouth with his fingers. “I get that. Really, I do. That was…a real shitty mistake. I wasn’t, like…” he sighed and grit his jaw through the admission, “…in my right mind. No more cold turkey, _believe_ me on that one.”

No part of Hill appeared wholly convinced, but he carried on anyway. “Once this medication begins collecting in your system, as it already has, simply stopping your dose will _absolutely_ result in an incredibly unpleasant withdrawal.”

“Okay—”

“No.” Hill held up a finger, his tone edging towards admonishment. “Not ‘okay,’ Josh. Listen to me. I’m telling you this because it is of _great_ importance. Withdrawal from this medication can and _will_ not only bring back your nightmares and issues with sleeping, but may also result in incredible stomach issues, paranoia, difficulty regulating your anger, you could _hallucinate_ , you could experience ataxia—are you aware of what ataxia is?”

He shrugged noncommittally, gnawing on his upper lip as he bore the chastisement.

“It means you can lose control of your physical movement. This could mean twitches, spasms, slurred speech…it’s not something you want to toy with.”

A beat passed, then two, then Josh looked up from his lap. “I understand.”

“I hope you do. I’ve been doing this for a long time, Josh. A _very_ long time. I cannot tell you how many times, across the span of my career, I have seen patients decide that they don’t _need_ their medication anymore, or they simply no longer want to be on it. They begin to feel better, more functional, more coherent, and decide they don’t need to continue the protocol, only to end up right back where they started.” Hill took a deep breath in and let it out in what was almost a sigh, folding his hands in front of himself on the desk. His cheeks puffed and hollowed thoughtfully. “Josh, I hope you realize I don’t bring this up as some attempt to scold you. That could not be farther from my intent. As I’ve mentioned before, your history with medication has been…less than ideal. I just worry that this is something none of your previous doctors have thought to discuss with you.”

His first impulse was to fire off some sort of witty retort…but he found his reserves dry. Instead, he just nodded. “I get it. I…I do.”

“I just want you to be prepared for when you go home.”

“I know,” he repeated for what felt like the thousandth time. “I will be. Trust me, Alan, if there’s one thing I _don’t_ want to risk, it’s dealing with the nightmares again, all right? You don’t have to worry about it. Learned my lesson like a good little boy should.” 

It seemed to appease him, if only for the time being. “All right. Now, on a related topic, have you thought at all about what we discussed in our last session?”

Lips pursed, Josh lifted and dropped his shoulders in a weak shrug. The action made him feel like a petulant child, but it was the one thing (well, _second_ thing, if the medication shit counted) that he’d been dreading dredging back up. “Yeah,” he said quietly, punctuating it with a nod.

Hill raised his eyebrows expectantly, rocking forward in his seat to rest his elbows against the desk. “What _precisely_ have you been thinking about?”

“Uh…hmm.” He heaved a sigh through his nose before slumping himself back in the chair. “Everything you said last time…makes…sense. About…being too close to pick things apart, I guess.” 

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Well, it…it makes _sense_ …but…” Josh let his head loll back onto his shoulders. It was easier to look at the ceiling than Hill, sometimes. “I’m _still_ mad. It’s _still_ hard for me to…I don’t know. Think about everything in a different way. I’m pissed at who I’m pissed at, and I blame who I blame, and that’s…it. Even if I _try_ to look at it differently, I just keep coming back to it.”

In lieu of picking up his notepad, Hill folded his arms across his chest. “I had suspected as much. I’m actually quite glad that you brought that up— _I_ was going to, if you didn’t. I have another exercise I’d like you to try, Josh.” Noticing the way his mouth curled at the suggestion, Hill chuckled. “Don’t worry, I’m not expecting you to do it today. No, this is more of a long-term exercise, I think. Something you’ll have to ponder long after you’re back home.”

It would be a lie to say he wasn’t at least _slightly_ interested in the prospect. Josh made a low sound of interest to suggest as much, still trying to shake off the feeling of being so thoroughly cowed.

“Many people, myself included I might add, find that it’s easier to work through inner conflict if they abstract their issues into something else.” He spread his hands wide, “For instance, the story we went over in the last session. One could say that it was an abstraction of a more _relevant_ circumstance, couldn’t one?”

“One could…” he began cautiously. “But…”

“But?”

“I’m not really much of a writer,” Josh deadpanned. “It’s just…not really my bag, you know? Don’t get me wrong, I won’t sit here and say I haven’t been tempted to sit down and type up some truly heinous Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction—I mean, I think we’ve _all_ been there—but words aren’t really, uh, my thing.” He shrugged amiably enough, casting his eyes towards one of the bookshelves instead of running the risk of meeting Hill’s gaze. “I don’t know if storytelling is gonna be my best bet, there.”

Showing absolutely no sign of discouragement, Hill returned the shrug. “Prose can be difficult! It takes practice. Poetry too, for that matter. However…unless my memory is already beginning to go, I seem to recall that you _are_ , in fact, rather skilled in another form of narrative expression.” At that, he couldn’t help but smile, catching Josh’s perplexed gaze. “You could always write a screenplay, of sorts.”

Josh blinked as the thought settled in his mind, not quite taking root, but sticking to _something_ , all the same. “I could make a movie,” he muttered thoughtfully, brow knitting with a tired sort of realization. And then, louder with resolve, “I could make a _movie_.”

“It could be a way for you to organize your thoughts,” Hill agreed, his cool expression belying how pleased he was. “Self-expression can be…incredibly healing.”

***

**Sunday, May 18, 2014  
5:35pm**

There was something bittersweet about officially moving out of the dorm. Sure, it marked the end of finals and (if truth be told) a semester full of unpleasantly unnecessary core classes…but it also meant pulling up stakes and leaving the four walls and bed she’d spent so much of the past year in. Lord knew the memories that room had absorbed, wrapped up tight like gnats caught in a spider web or nightmares in a dream catcher—it was the bed she’d slept in after every failed trip back from Blackwood Pines, the desk where she’d listened to hour after hour of radio updates, the walls she’d covered in photos and trinkets from better times, the air where so much bad news had hung.

It felt good to leave it behind, but it ached. When they’d pulled into the driveway, she’d been struck with the pretentiously poetic idea that the dorm was like a scab of sorts. In and of itself, it had done nothing wrong, it had caused no injury. If anything, it was just… _there_ , existing in the aftermath of what had happened to draw blood. It was nothing, it was blameless, yet the sight of it brought everything back. Scabs fell off, though, sometimes they were _pulled_ off, and sometimes that was for the best. Sometimes the wound needed to breathe.

Sam wasn’t actually sure that was correct. She’d considered asking her dad for half a second before deciding against it; the day had been _long_ and _hot_ and full of the strain of moving over-packed boxes…she didn’t need to end it getting a lecture about the hygiene of picking at scabs.

Already the majority of the boxes had been moved into the house, leaving little more than her laundry basket full of clothes, a shelving unit or two, and her shower caddy. She was looking forward to _nothing_ more than nudging everything into a tight pile in the corner of the basement and letting it gather dust for a week or two before _actually_ unpacking. She’d just take care of the last few things, hop in the shower, eat something, and then pass the fuck _out_ until the last strains of finals anxiety leached out of her.

Stacking one of the plastic shelves on top of the mountain of clothes in her laundry hamper, she didn’t even register the sound coming from behind her until it was too late.

“ _Hey!_ ” The shout was followed by an _unbelievably_ loud blast from a car horn, causing her to drop everything onto the driveway.

Sam clutched at her chest as her pulse threatened to burst its way through her skin. For a fraction of a second, she scowled down at the pile of shirts and jeans spread across the cement, an exhausted little voice in her head bemoaning how long it would take to rewash everything. She spun around, not really sure what she was going to do when she found herself face-to-face with the jackass who’d scared her...

Only to find her words swallowed up by the swelling of her heart.

The convertible at the end of her driveway was distantly familiar…the faces leering at her from inside even more so. With the top down as it was, she had no issue seeing the others’ grins or hearing their laughter.

“Get in, loser.” Behind the wheel, Josh lowered his sunglasses dramatically. “We’re going _shopping_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thanks so much for reading! If you didn't know, you can find me on tumblr under the name QueenofBaws--I'm ALWAYS accepting writing prompts/ideas in my inbox, and I'm just typically more active/present over there.
> 
> For those of you who are (like me) in the direct path of this arctic blast, please stay safe and warm! Above all else, don't go running into the woods when you know there's a big ol' winter storm coming in...especially not with February 2nd coming up. We all know how that one ends. ;P Bundle up!


	7. Where there's (a kiss)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Relevant tags for this chapter: Bad jokes, the Twilight picture, TERRIBLE jokes, discussions about grief and grieving.

**Saturday, June 14, 2014**  
**10:00am**

The cursor blinked. And blinked. And blinked some more. Without realizing it, he’d taken to tapping his middle finger against the ‘O’ key in time, marking a rhythm that wasn’t entirely unlike the metronome Hill used on occasion. It wasn’t helping, but it wasn’t _hurting_ , either.

A jerky shove against his desk sent his chair wheeling back across the floor, and he spun a lazy circle in the beams of light peeking through his blinds. Josh laced his fingers together before covering his eyes, just letting himself sit in the warm patch of sunlight, his head full of angry buzzing. None of the thoughts were _useful_. None of them went anywhere. They were just flitting around like pissed off wasps in a shaken nest.

To be fair, he’d taken Hill’s advice to heart: He’d plunged himself into developing the movie just as soon as he’d unpacked his bags and cut away the hospital wristband. Having something to distract him was good, but if he was being entirely honest with himself, the past few weeks had been full of more _frustration_ than anything else.

Not that it was for lack of trying! No, he’d certainly been trying—and trying _real_ fucking hard, at that. There was hardly a spot on his desk or corkboard or side table that _wasn’t_ covered in crumpled pieces of paper. Hell, his trashcan was beginning to look like a kid’s volcano experiment, if instead of baking soda and vinegar lava, it shot out wadded up loose-leaf. For the most part, he figured only the stuff pinned to the corkboard was salvageable…the sketched diagrams of the haunted mansion, basic blocked-out storyboards to give him an idea of the camera direction, that sort of thing. What was on the desk and side table was iffier. He had the general _idea_ of how he wanted the characters to look…or at least, he _thought_ he did. But every time he managed to get a face drawn out, it was _wrong_ somehow, or missing something. They were good for reference, but most of them were fairly spooky in their varying stages of completion. Some were eyeless, some mouthless, some profiles, some scratched out until they were little more than blobs.

The stuff in the trash was worthless. Those pieces of paper, torn and balled, were the written notes he’d been trying to take, the dialogue he’d been scribbling down whenever it occurred to him. And, not to put too fine a point on it, it was all _shit_.

Maybe not _shit._ That was being a little harsh. It was probably better than ninety percent of the dreck Bob cranked out in a year, but it wasn’t _right_. It wasn’t the story he had in his head. It wasn’t the story he _needed it to be_.

He let out a loud, drawn-out groan, using his foot to push himself in another dizzy circle. His room spun around him in a blur of colors until he reached out and grabbed the side of his desk, bringing the merry-go-round to a sudden stop. “Oookay,” Josh muttered to the open air as he scooted back in front of his laptop. “Let’s do this…once more. With _feeling_ this time, huh?” Trying not to sigh, he pulled up the document he’d been writing in and quickly skimmed it.

> **EXT. MANSION – MIDNIGHT**
> 
> **The grounds are foggy. It’s almost too thick to see anything. Except the lights of the windows, which are orange/yellow in the dark.**
> 
> **PAN TO BOTTOM OF DRIVE**
> 
> **We see four shadowy figures. They’re looking at the house. We’re behind them, so it’s not clear who’s talking.**
> 
> **MEAN GIRL  
>  I can’t believe we’re doing this.**
> 
> **COMEDIC RELIEF/ALPHA MALE(?)  
>  And I can’t believe we got you to look up from your phone for five minutes. It’s a night of surprises, isn’t it?**
> 
> **He(?) puts his(?) elbow up onto MEAN GIRL’s shoulder, leaning against her.  
>  **
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT  
>  I don’t know, guys. I don’t think we should be here. It doesn’t…feel right…**
> 
> **SLOW PAN AND CAMERA TURN**
> 
> **The last speaker is a girl, brow furrowed. She looks resolved more than scared. Her head is held high and her hands are fists at her sides.  
>  **
> 
> **FINAL GIRL  
>  We have to do this. All of us. We don’t have a choice.**
> 
> **The four of them…**

The cursor just kept blinking, marking the unfinished sentence with unapologetic cruelty. It was almost nothing. He’d been working all morning for _almost nothing_.

Josh reached up and cracked the knuckles of his left hand, then his right, stretched his fingers out, then tightened them into fists. He’d had the document open since he’d woken up a few hours ago, but neither time nor breakfast nor the hot shower he’d taken had done _anything_ to help him make _any_ progress.

“Told you writing wasn’t my thing, Alan…”

In three keystrokes, it was gone. All of it. Probably for the best, really.

The chair creaked under him when he leaned back, kicking his feet up onto the desk, careful to avoid the laptop. He rubbed tiredly at his arms, craning his head further and further back until he nearly managed to get an upside-down view of the wall behind him. None of it should’ve been so _hard_.

It was the characters, he thought. If he had more solid _characters_ , the story would unfold itself at their feet. Working with tropey horror husks was all fine and good, but they needed names and faces and _motivations_. How were they all _connected_ to the haunting? More to the point, how were they all connected to _each other?_ In his experience, the perfect, plastic-y types didn’t usually pal around with the crybaby sidekicks. Why were they doing _any_ of it?

A shuffle of papers as he dropped his legs to the floor and rolled again, flipping through the rumpled stack of potential designs lying around. He spent a minute or two going through them, letting the cast-offs fall to the floor until there were no more to look at. “Clearly…this isn’t supposed to happen today.” He set his head down on the desk, pillowing it with his arms. In all his years of knowing her, he’d seen Ashley fill stacks upon stacks of composition notebooks with stories and snippets—and there _he_ was, unable to get so much as an establishing shot done. It didn’t make _sense_. Maybe…maybe he’d take her aside later and ask for some advice. That would be good, wouldn’t it? _She’d_ like it, he was sure…give her a little confidence boost of her own.

Josh groaned into his arms and sat in the silence that followed. “Okay. Know what? This is fine. This is…a-okay.” Slowly, taking time to crack his spine out, he sat back up, drumming his hands absently against the desk. _None_ of the classics were written in a month. Not a single one. A month was still brainstorming time. The words would come…eventually.

God, he hoped they would come.

With a tap, he closed out of the document, finding himself staring at the dark landscape of his desktop.

His eyes moved to the folder labeled ‘school shit’ in much the same way a tongue finds itself prodding at the bloody hole of a missing tooth. His gut lurched, his fingers tingled, his throat tightened. Looking at the folder was worse than looking at the cursor and its fucking endless blinking. There was nothing in the blank writing document that could hurt him.

The folder was a different story. **  
**

Even as he thought it, he realized he was clicking it, opening it up to all of its subfolders. He didn’t want to be doing it (really, he _didn’t_ ), but it was as though his hands had thoughts of their own.

It had been Poe who’d written about it, right? He had some vague memory of reading it in an English or Literature class…the one about the letter. _The…_ something _Letter_. Much of it was already gone, never actually learned or memorized, but kept in his short-term memory up until the moment of the exam, where he’d promptly flushed it away to never be seen again. He could remember the twist of it, though, the way the mysterious letter the police had been looking for had been hidden in plain sight all along. No one ever looked for the big, bad, gnarly shit out in the open; no one went snooping around in someone else’s boring homework files.

No one cared about the school folder of a college dropout.

There it was, nestled comfortably between two files from his film appreciation course.

_untitled1.mov_

He double-clicked the file, keeping his eyes low on his keyboard until he heard the first muffled giggles. Already, his palms felt clammy with…what? Apprehension? Disgust? _Fear?_

Before he could think on it too much, he clicked the video again to make it fill the screen.

It was torturous. He knew each line, each movement of the camera, each shitty angle, each time the lens was blocked by a slat. He knew it in the same way he knew _all_ the classics, could probably quote it line-for-line if anyone ever asked (not that anyone ever _would_ ). The worst part was…he didn’t _want_ to be watching it, he really didn’t. Every part of his brain was screaming out at him to close it down, to turn away, to just _delete the fucking thing_. It wasn’t going to help him heal, it wasn’t going to help him work through jack _shit_ …

But it was _there_. It was accessible. And since they’d left the lodge, it was the only tangible thing he had left.

First, there was laughter—muffled behind hands, but high and shrill and feminine. Jessica and Emily shushed each other. There was always a pang at that point, an angry spike of something in his stomach, when he heard _Ashley’s_ laugh underneath theirs. Then there was some vague rustling as Matt tucked himself away. Then Mike muttered something he couldn’t quite make out, but seemed to make Emily and Jessica start to giggle again. A minute passed like that (seventy three seconds, not that he had counted) before the door opened and Hannah walked in.

He hadn’t been able to get through that part for a long time. His throat always tightened and his face lit up with the agony of secondhand shame when Hannah reached for the top button of her shirt, still so unaware of what was happening. And that was the kicker, really…no matter how many times he watched, she was always _unaware_. It didn’t matter what he grumbled at the screen, Hannah never caught on. Not until it was too late, anyway.

By now, it was easier to watch; still not _easy_ , but _easier_.

_“Wait, wha…Matt? What’re you doing here?!”_

Click.

_“What’re you doing here?!”_

Click.

_“What’re you doing here?!”_

Click.

_“What’re you doing—”_

Chin in hands, he stared at the screen with the corners of his mouth tucked in. The video quality was shit—the room had been dark, the phone’s camera hadn’t compensated for that, and of course, Matt had been hidden in a fucking armoire when he’d taken it—but he could still see Hannah. Could still see the terror on her face, the betrayal, the pale X of her arms as she covered herself from the others’ laughter. He could still see his sister.

_BZZT!_

Josh jumped about a mile out of his chair at the noise. He whipped his head to the side only to see the screen of his phone brightly lit up with a new notification. “Mother _fuck!_ ” An anxious laugh escaped him, exorcising most of the tension from his chest. Laughing in earnest, he tapped the notification, bringing up Snapchat. “Fuck, jumpier than a coked up kangaroo, huh, Joshy?” he muttered to himself, “Turning into _Ash_ , buddy boy.” And then, actually opening the Snap, “And _speak_ of the devil.”

The picture was hastily taken, if the blur was anything to go by. In the foreground, Chris and Ashley were all crossed eyes and puffed cheeks, hamming it up for the camera; he had to admit it served as a _beautiful_ counterpoint to Sam in the background, clearly unaware that a picture was being taken at all, her own face obliviously caught between expressions, her eyes downcast on her own phone. Slashed across the photo was a text box proclaiming “BABE DELIVERY!!!!!!!!!” followed by a positively unintelligible string of unrelated emojis. “Artful, Cochise,” he muttered to himself. “Coulda just honked.”

Without looking up from the phone, he struck out at the keyboard, two fingers tapping the space bar with all the precision and force of a cobra’s fangs. The video paused just as Sam burst into the room, the screen split between her indignation and Hannah’s agony. He reached up and shut his laptop, feeling some heavy cloud lift from his shoulders once the video had been safely hidden away again. Scrubbing at his face with his hands, he made a mental note to just…bite the bullet and delete the awful thing once and for all. It wasn’t doing _him_ any good, obviously…and fuck, if anyone found it on his computer…well, it’d be a _hell_ of a lot harder to explain away than porn, that much was for fucking sure. But that was something to think about later.

Just then, he had _bigger_ plans for the day. Grander plans. And those plans started with him letting the others into the house.

*******

**12:07pm**

“Can you just help me with this? I’m not getting it. It’s…it’s just too much.”  
  
Ashley raised an eyebrow as she sat up from her nest of pillows. “When you say _help_ , do you really mean _write it for you?_ Because _I_ don’t have summer reading to do, Chris. Not gonna do _yours_.”  
  
He rocked back on the couch, pressing a hand over his heart. “Ash—you _wound_ me. When have I _ever_ asked you to do my homework for me?” Silence. “Okay, okay, so maybe I’ve asked once or twice. Throw me a bone here, I’m not really a smart person, I just play one on tv.”  
  
Sighing, she dog-eared the page of the novel she’d been reading, standing from her spot on the floor before plopping herself right back down next to Chris on the couch.

“Ooh, before we get too deep into this, that reminds me…” he steepled his fingers together with a chuckle, appearing a bit like a cartoon supervillain. “How’s it feel to be…” he made an unnecessarily loud _doot-doot-doot_ in an absolutely disastrous impression of a trumpet _,_ “ _Done_ with high school?”

“It’s thrilling, truly. I feel like maybe I’d be able to enjoy it a little more if I was able to, you know, enjoy my first official summer vacay as a grad if I wasn’t…oh, I dunno…doing _your homework._ ” She shot him a smirk before heaving another sigh. “Mk, what’re you not getting?” She took his laptop from him unceremoniously, leaning forward to quickly skim the assignment. “Did you even read the book?” Her look was somehow simultaneously accusatory and amused.  
  
“Did I read _Romeo and Juliet_?” Chris pretended to be aghast. “Of _course_ I read it.”  
  
Ashley’s eyebrow quirked again.  
  
“I watched the movie.”  
  
“ _Chris._ ”  
  
“It was some of Leo DiCaprio’s best work, Ash. He’s a master of his craft. A _master_.”  
  
She snorted a breath that could’ve been a laugh, shaking her head as she turned back to the prompt. “Okay, _sure._ But I don’t see what’s not to get, here.”  
  
Chris hefted himself back upright with a groan, hunching over the computer with her. “It’s the whole…dramatic irony thing.” He gestured vaguely, hands and fingers twirling in the air, “No idea what that’s about. I thought the whole _thing_ was dramatic. That’s the _point_ of _Romeo and Juliet_ , right? _Drama?_ ”  
  
“No, dramatic irony is…” Ashley stopped abruptly, shooting Chris a sidelong glance. “Did you pay attention in English even _once?_ ”  
  
It was _his_ turn to raise _his_ eyebrows. “Hey Ash? Real quick, what is it about me—as a _person_ —that would lead you to believe I could _ever_ be capable of paying attention in English? What about me screams ‘Yes! This is exactly what I want to be doing right now! Reading! Oh boy!?’ Please tell me. Please tell me immediately so that I can change it.”  
  
She shoved him with her elbow, sending him sprawling back once more. “You’re such a tool…” she snickered. “Okay, okay. Look. Like you, dramatic irony is _also_ a tool. A tool that, when used well…or even just correctly, I guess, can fill the reader with a real sense of dread or tension...or sometimes frustration. It’s when the audience, in this case, the readers, know something that the characters don’t.” With that, she lifted the laptop and dropped it back on Chris’s lap. “There you go.”  
  
“Wait—wait.” He nabbed the back of her shirt with two fingers before she could stand from the couch. “That doesn’t make sense either. How do the characters not know _everything_ the reader knows? The reader only knows it because the characters tell them.”  
  
Ashley couldn’t help but roll her eyes to the ceiling. “Holy crap. How did _you_ graduate, again?”  
  
“I’m good with those newfangled electronic devices the kids talk so much about these days. And extra credit. Lots of extra credit.”  
  
Clucking her tongue in a decidedly matronly way, she readjusted herself so that she sat facing him, pulling her legs up onto the couch. “The characters do _not_ always know everything the reader does. Look at it this way…” She paused, lips pulling into a grimace of concentration as she thought up an example. “Okay…uh, at the end, when Romeo walks into the crypt and sees Juliet lying there, looking all dead and stuff, and you see him freak out and drink the poison to kill himself…what are you feeling? What are you _thinking?_ As the reader, I mean.”  
  
Chris shrugged, shaking his head slightly. “Uh, I don’t know…I’m thinking he’s an idiot, mostly.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
He laughed, “Because if he waited like three more minutes, she would’ve woken up. But instead, he goes and drinks the medieval equivalent of drain cleaner. You know, _as you do_ …”  
  
“Right!” she clapped her hands together for emphasis. “ _You_ know that Juliet is alive. She’s fine! She’s just sleeping! But Romeo _doesn’t_ know that. So we see him take out the poison, we hear his plan, and we think ‘ _Don’t do it!’_ Because yeah, if he would’ve waited three more minutes, or if he had, I don’t know…poked her or something, everything would’ve been fine! But he doesn’t have the same information we do, so he can’t act on it. And the audience is powerless to do anything about that, other than sit back and watch it, just… _knowing_ what’s going to happen.”  
  
“I guess that makes sense…”  
  
“Good. Think you can write your essay now? Can I go back to my book?”  
  
“Only on one condition.” Chris straightened up again, setting his laptop down on the floor before leaning in and taking both of Ashley’s hands in his, looking her square in the eye with an uncharacteristically dour expression. “I need you to promise me something, Ashley Brown.”  
  
“I’d rather not.”  
  
“Promise that if you ever find me dead somewhere, you’ll actually check to make sure I’m dead.” As he said it, she began to laugh, and he reached up with one hand to jokingly smoosh her cheeks in. “No, no Ash, I am so serious. If you ever see what _appears_ to be my dead body, please. Poke it. With a finger, with a stick, I don’t care, it’s all the same to me. Put a mirror to my mouth to see if I’m breathing. Slap me around a little. Do that thing doctors do where they lift up your eyelids and check my eye situation. Promise me, Ash. Don’t just assume I’m dead unless you can actually _see_ that like…I’ve been sliced in half. Or if my head is three feet away from the rest of my hot bod. It’s probably safe to assume I’m dead then. But under _any other circumstance_ , you gotta check. _Promise me_.”  
  
Still laughing, she made another halfhearted attempt to shove him away. “Oh, if you’re giving me permission to smack you, I will be more than happy to take you up on _that_ offer.” She collapsed into another fit of giggles as her voice came out distorted by the way he’d pushed her cheeks in.  
  
“Wait, wait, one more condition. If it turns out that I did, in fact, die of drinking medieval drain cleaner, you are still more than welcome to try and kiss it off of me. In fact, I encourage it! Just because it didn’t work for Jules doesn’t mean it won’t work for you.”  
  
“ _Jules?_ ”  
  
“Would you prefer Julie? How about Julie-Bean? J-Mizzle?”  
  
“No. I’m sure this comes as a shock, but no, I really wouldn’t prefer _any_ of those.”  
  
“You’re avoiding the subject.” Chris chuckled, “Look, if I really _am_ dead, no one will ever find out that you were kissing on a dead guy. But if I’m actually _alive_ , then your secret is safe with me.”  
  
“My secret of kissing on dead guys.”  
  
“Debatably dead guys, at least.”  
  
She pretended to think it over, pursing her lips in thought, giving herself an exaggeratedly fish-faced pout in the process. “Is that still going to be a requirement if your head _is_ three feet away from the rest of your…” she rolled her eyes with a loud, theatrical sigh, “I think you used the phrase ‘hot bod’?”

“I mean, it couldn’t hurt to _check_ , right?”

Ashley attempted to stick her tongue out to no avail—Chris was smooshing her cheeks _just_ enough to make it nearly impossible. That in itself made her laugh again, the sound coming out as more of a snort than anything else. And then _Chris_ was laughing at the ridiculousness of the sound. They were _both_ laughing and laughing up until the precise moment they _weren’t_ , the hilarity tapering into silence.

A comfortable silence, but a _charged_ one, no doubt about that.

The room felt almost impossibly still around them in that moment, and though she knew she didn’t have the courage to actually look up and check, Ashley was seized by a sudden sense of _knowing_ ; Chris was looking at her lips. The thought was absolutely bonkers (she would’ve called it _laughable_ , had it not literally stopped her from laughing only a moment ago), probably only brought on by the fact that kissing had been at the forefront of their stupid conversation, but still it remained. Worse, she realized belatedly that yeah, whoops, okay, regardless of whether or not he really _was_ looking at hers, _she_ was definitely looking at _his_.

Well…shit.

When she’d think back on it later (and she _would_ , not just that night but for the rest of the fucking _week_ ), her only explanation would be that she must’ve gone momentarily insane. Lost her goddamn mind. Because Ashley Brown _leaned in_. The one bit of solace she had, even as she turned it over in her mind a hundredthousandmillion times, was that Chris _didn’t pull away_. She felt her eyes flutter closed, felt Chris’s hand on her chin, felt the couch cushions shift under them, a miniscule movement, probably less than a fraction of an inch at first, but…

The door to the garage banged open with enough force to rattle the windows in their panes, and the two of them sprang apart as if they’d been caught in the midst of some obscene act, eyes wide and hearts thundering.

“Fuck me _sideways!_ ” Josh’s voice was still distant, muffled by the wall, but it quickly became clearer as he stepped into the house. “It’s hotter than Satan’s taint, out there.” There was a crinkling, a grunt, and then the sound of groceries being dropped onto the kitchen counter. “Don’t ask me how I know that, by the way.”  
  
“Wasn’t gonna.” From the sound of it, Sam unloaded an armful of bags as well. “Here, you want—”

“Oooh, yes please. Aw shit, that’s sticky.”

“Oh hey, hold up a sec, do you want my cherry?”

“In more ways than you know, Sammy. In more ways than you know.”

“Wow. Smooth. Does that usually work on people, or…?" **  
**

Ashley was on her feet immediately, acting as though someone had literally lit a fire under her ass. She hesitated walking into the kitchen, feeling her face burning red-hot, instead clearing her throat and trying to act as though she _hadn’t_ just almost…done that. “Wow, you guys took forever.”

It was Josh who sauntered into the living room first, making a grand show of scooping something out of a styrofoam cup and licking it graphically off of a spoon. “Yeah, we made a pit stop. Didn’t realize you were timing us.” A wrinkle appeared between his eyebrows as he frowned, looking Ashley over once. “Do I need to turn up the a/c or something? You’re like…bright fucking red, Ash. Little young for hot flashes, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, it’s uh. It’s warm,” she muttered, quickly skirting around him to hide away in the kitchen, letting Chris deal with the brunt of Josh’s questioning. “That’s…a lot of food you guys bought.” She tried clearing her throat again, feeling like her voice might _never_ stop wavering. Ashley peered into a bag, busying herself with looking through everything they’d picked up. “Like…a _lot_. Is this supposed to all be for _us?_ ”

If Sam noticed how she was behaving, she didn’t show any sign. Like Josh, she held a styrofoam cup in one hand, only half-heartedly rummaging through the grocery bags with the other. “I don’t ask questions anymore,” she joked, taking a strenuous sip through a fat straw. “I just pushed the cart.” Unable to find whatever it was she’d been looking for, she sighed, looking over to her. “What’d you guys get up to while we were gone? You finish your book?”

“Uh…”

From the living room, Chris’s voice rang out. “You _dick!_ You didn’t get _me_ one?”

“You know the rules, Cochise. You didn’t come for the ride-along, you don’t get to revel in the spoils of the trip. If you _wanted_ a milkshake, you shoulda come with.”

“I didn’t realize milkshakes were on the table!”

“No table,” Sam corrected helpfully. “They did bring them out to the car on a fun little tray, though. It was very cute.” She leaned against the doorway, similarly exaggerating how good her shake was with each drink. “That little place by the store, uh…Timmy’s? Or something like that…they have vegan milkshakes—how _cool_ is that? I’m in my _glory_ , over here.”

Chris screwed his face up in displeasure, “Yeah. It’s great. I’m like _super_ happy for you.”

“It’s mint chocolate chip,” Sam added.

“How…dare you flaunt that in front of me?” Unless it was just her imagination (and Lord knew hers was wild enough), Ashley could’ve sworn _his_ face was just as red as hers.

Josh brushed past Sam with a joking little bow, moving back into the kitchen to look over the haul. “Yeah, enjoy the vegan shit while it lasts, because this is gonna be a good, old-fashioned, all-American bee-bee-que, ladies and gents. More burgers and dogs than you can shove into your gob.”

“Footlongs, I hope.”

“Aw man, you know size doesn’t matter, right, Cochise?”

“Who’s been telling _you_ that?”

Taking each item out of its bag and setting it neatly on the counter, Ashley lifted her eyes to Sam’s in a wordless look of exasperation, shaking her head even as she laughed. “This is just…geez Louise, this is just way too much food."

She joined Ashley in organizing the groceries but did little more than shrug in response to her observation. “You wanna sip?” Sam nodded towards her milkshake, shrugging when Ashley shook her head, “Your loss.”

“Does Josh really think we’re gonna like…gorge ourselves?” Ashley pulled another pack of hotdogs from a bag, furrowing her brow as she added it to the rapidly growing stack.

“I think he just didn’t want to admit the house needed groceries, is what I think.” Sam took another few gulps before returning to the task at hand. “For real though, where did they put…hmm…”

Ashley frowned. “But it’s just him and his _mom_ most of the time while his dad’s filming, and like…does his mom _only_ eat hotdogs? That doesn’t strike me as a particularly sustainable lifestyle.” She shot Sam a slow, suspicious glance, “Do you…know something I don’t?”

“About whether or not Mrs. Washington _only_ eats hotdogs? No Ash, I really don’t have any further insights to offer you.” She laughed, then abruptly gasped, plunging her hands into the bag with gusto. Sam pulled out a small jar with a proud flourish. “Aha! I knew it was in here… _I_ got us grenadine and maraschino cherries, so we can make Shirley Temples.”

It was _Ashley’s_ turn to gasp, the sound loud enough to startle both Josh and Chris into jumping, even though they were one room over. “Oh my _God_ , I _love_ Shirley Temples!”

“ _Right?!_ Like…do you know how many of these things I would just _pound_ at bowling alley birthday parties?”

“And _bat mitzvahs_ ,” Ashley added with a sagely nod. “I haven’t had one since like…ever. Oh man, I’m so psyched!”

“They’re the ultimate party drink.” It was quick, there and gone in the blink of an eye, but Ashley _swore_ she saw Sam cringe after saying it.

If her curiosity wasn’t piqued before, it sure fucking was _now_. Assuming as casual a posture as she could, Ashley opened one of the bottom cabinets and pulled out the plastic bag full of _other_ plastic bags, proceeding to jam the _new_ plastic bags inside. “So this is a party, huh?” she asked breezily.

“Well, I wouldn’t call it a ‘ _party_ ,’ per se.” The answer didn’t come from Sam, but Josh, his voice thickened as he spoke around a mouthful of milkshake. “It’s an _almost_ -party. An _Almost_ party. Get it? Get it??”

“That’s so gross,” Sam said curtly, pulling a face in his direction. “No one wants to see or hear your food, Josh.”

“Incorrect. You _all_ do.”

Ashley rolled her eyes as she leaned back against the counter, resting her hands against the edge. “Does my vote count?”

“Your vote counts the _least_.” Josh swallowed audibly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He pitched his empty milkshake cup into the open trashcan, dramatically bowing and waving his hands as Chris appeared behind him, pretending to cheer. “I’m right though, aren’t I, Christopher, my good man?”

“Oh yeah, definitely, definitely.” Chris set his elbow atop Josh’s shoulder, leaning his weight against him. Pausing, he leaned in and stage-whispered, “Right about _what?_ ”

“That all of you, my dearly beloveds, are gathered here today for a relaxing day of food, fun-in-the-sun, swimming, and in all honesty, probably smacking _you_ a _whole_ lot when you forget your sunscreen—”

“Like always,” Ashley interjected.

“—and burn to a fucking _crisp_ —”

“Like always.”

“—and cry like a bitch whenever you bend any of your joints because you hurt so bad.”

“ _Like always_.”

Chris scowled amid their laughter, shoving Josh away from him. “Oh, ha ha. I get it, let’s gang up on the pasty nerd and make fun of his inability to tan. Real nice. Real _classy_ , that’s what you guys are.”

“Hey, chill. _Chill_ , man. I think our lovely ladies here will agree with me when I suggest that there’s _nothing_ sexier than a dad bod with a little sun-kissed glow.”

“ _I don’t have a dad bod!_ ”

“Stop denying the truth, dude. ‘ _Remember who you are, Simba_ ,’ and all that. And who _you_ are…is a pasty nerd with a dad bod.” He lifted his hands to shield himself from what appeared to be a very genuine punch from Chris, only fueling his laughter. “Girls _love_ dad bods! Just ask! Hey Ash—” Chris’s punching seemed to increase at that, “—you’re into dad bods, right?”

She rolled her eyes and actively turned away, taking Sam up on her offer of a sip of milkshake. Sam, however, was more than happy to lean forward, grinning innocently through the barricade of food. “Chris, ignore Josh. I, for one, think you’re perfect just the way you are.” A beat. “Dad bod and all.”

Chris groaned in defeat, but before he could let his head loll back in frustration, Josh had hooked an arm around his neck, pulling him in close with seemed to be more of a chokehold than anything else. “Speaking of poolside sunburns…do you think we should…?” he let it trail off, waggling his eyebrows mysteriously. “Y’know…?” Josh nodded curtly towards the sunroom, where the door to the backyard was.

It took him a second to stop his flailing attempts to get out of Josh’s grip. “Should we wh— _oh_. Oh yeah, yeah let’s…do that.”

“You girls got this, right?” Josh asked, gesturing vaguely to all the food. “We’ve got some… _things_ to attend to.”

“So many things.”

“Are you insinuating that _we_ put the food away because we’re _women?_ ” Ashley asked scathingly, raising her eyebrows and tracking the two of them as they pushed each other towards the sunroom.

“No, Ash, I’m not insinuating that,” Josh sighed. “I’m _overtly stating_ it. This is the kitchen. Where you belong. Now make my lunch and put my food away, woman, while Chris and I go do manly things to each other in the pool shed.”

Chris snickered…and then stopped. “I—wait. Wait, don’t I get a say in this? Aren’t you at least gonna buy me dinner or someth—” He yelped as Josh pushed him out the sliding door and into the backyard. A moment later, their voices had trailed off entirely, leaving Sam and Ashley alone again.

“Is it just me,” Ashley asked, following the boys with her eyes until they disappeared around the corner, “Or are they acting like… _particularly_ weird today?”

“I don’t know about _particularly_ weird. That’s sort of a hard thing to judge with them.” Sam put a bottle of mustard down onto the counter and set her hands on her hips, looking around the kitchen. “But I’m definitely not finding room for all this stuff in here. That is _so_ not my job.”

“Yeah… _yeah!_ Screw that.” She pushed herself away from the counter and made her way back towards the living room where she and Chris had been earlier. “Know what we should do instead? While they’re doing…” Ashley waved her hand vaguely, “Whatever it is they’re doing in the pool shed?”

Sam nodded fervently. “I would greatly enjoy doing _anything_ that doesn’t involve thinking about them in the pool shed, thanks.”

Bright sunlight filtered through the living room’s windows, making the space seem even larger than it actually was. The Browns’ apartment was quaint and cozy with its warm colors and overstuffed furniture, the Hartleys’ house was the picture of homespun suburbia with its crocheted afghans and family photos, but the Washingtons’ house (the Washingtons’ _estate_ , they all joked) was…different. Sam had spent her fair share of time in the house during high school—studying with Hannah, sleeping over, even just having dinner or a snack before going home for the day—and it always had the strangest sense of…well, not being lived in.

It was a _huge_ place—that was probably the root of the problem. She made a mental note to eventually ask one of the others just _how_ many rooms there were. There were only a handful she was familiar with, herself: the living room, Hannah’s and Beth’s rooms, the screening room, the bathrooms, the kitchen…In a way, it almost felt like the lodge. The décor couldn’t have been more different, all bright whites and dark blacks, occasionally broken by some vivid spot of whatever accent color was currently en vogue at that time (currently some shade of purplish-pink), and everything was _always_ clean, spotless and shining, yet the feeling remained. It made sense, really, since the two places _were_ decorated by the same person and owned by the same people. And yet it had that same tense, mysterious air about it. Like you didn’t know what you might find if you opened a closed door too quickly. Like you could get lost if you weren’t paying close enough attention.

“I think it’s…uh…oh, here!” Ashley stood in front of one of the bookshelves along the back wall, tapping her chin until she was able to find what she’d been looking for. Carefully, she pulled a thick volume from the shelf, her smile widening as she turned it over in her hands. When her eyes found Sam’s, she drummed her fingers against its cover, her nails making a loud clicking sound against the heavy stock. “You wanna see something _real_ embarrassing?”

“Why is that even a question?”

Ashley curled up comfortably on the couch, pulling her legs up under her. She opened the book when Sam sat next to her, the thing big enough to spread across both of their laps. What Sam had first assumed was some sort of encyclopedia or maybe a weird dictionary, given how thick it was, turned out to be an incredibly detailed scrapbook full of photographs and mementos. It was clear Ashley knew what she was looking for as she flipped through page after page, each going by way too quickly for Sam to get a good look. For an instant, she pressed both of her palms down flat on either page, obscuring Sam’s view entirely. “Now I’m only showing you this because it’s the _one_ picture of us where I _don’t_ look the worst out of us all. I’m not ashamed to admit that.”

“Duly noted. I’m terrified.”

“Good, you should be.” With a laugh, Ashley turned the page, directing Sam’s gaze to one photo in particular.

The top of the page read “2009” in shining, holographic stickers, and yup…yup, that looked about right. From what she could tell, it had been taken in front of the Hartleys’ house, only because she could see the slightest sliver of what seemed to be a handmade autumn wreath hanging on the front door. The picture itself was a testament to the time—just blurry enough to suggest it had been taken on (gasp) an actual _camera_ , and not a _phone_. Sam’s focus _should’ve_ been whatever the _fuck_ was happening in the photo itself (baby Josh and baby Ashley were standing on either side of baby Chris, Josh looking very proud, Ashley looking like she was on the verge of crying from laughter; Chris, though, couldn’t have looked _less_ amused if he tried, mainly because he appeared to be wrapped from waist-to-mouth in masking tape like a bargain bin version of a mummy), but what _actually_ got her was everything else.

“ _Wow_ ,” she said when she finally found herself able to say _anything_. “That’s…that’s a lot to take in.”

“Mhm, mhm…what’s hanging you up?” Ashley playfully nudged her with her shoulder, still giggling every time she glanced down at it. “Is it the tape?”

“Honestly? No. I wish it was!”

“Chris’s transition lenses? Yeah, that was a pretty dark time for all of us.”

“No, no…not that either. I mean, it’s a strong contender, but…There’s just…wow, there’s a lot of facial greasiness happening there.”  
  
“Which one of us?”  
  
“Oh, all of you. All three.” Sam nodded, furrowing her eyebrows as she bent over to get closer to the picture, scanning it with hawk-like precision. “And the braces! The braces are bad! But seriously, _God_ you’re all so shiny. Puberty, huh? Wow. Just. _Wow!_ ” She shook her head as though it would help her make sense of what she was seeing; she kept looking between the picture and Ashley, turning from side to side while comparing the two. “This is a lot, Ash.” She tapped her finger against the photo, “I like the hair, though! Man, this is _way_ before we met, huh? I feel like I’d remember…that.”

Ashley sucked a breath through her teeth, feigning yanking the book away from her. “Look, it was a _phase_ , okay?”

“Hey, I said I _like_ it! Purple was a good color on you.”

“Oh please.”

“No, for real! The choppiness of it, how washed out it is, the way your roots are starting to show…it all really goes together _very_ nicely with the arm warmers and…is that an _Invader Zim_ shirt I see?”

She threw her hands up in the air and let them fall. “At least I got better at doing my eye makeup, can you give me that?”

“Eh…” Seesawing her hand back and forth, Sam grinned. She managed to shove Ashley’s hand away, flipping through the pages of her own accord. “Sheesh, this is so _weird_ , seeing the baby versions of you guys.” Sam turned to the very last page of the scrapbook first, unable to help but beam down at all the cheesy smiles on the page. The spread was labeled “SUMMER 2012,” the photos interspersed with stubs of movie tickets and a couple of concert wristbands that had been pressed flat by time. The faces were a little more familiar in the photos—much, _much_ closer to what they currently looked like.

Sam ‘ooh’ed and ‘aww’ed as the book let them travel slowly through time, each page taking them further and further back into the past. She spotted herself in a few of the pictures, usually with one of the twins somewhere nearby, but she found she could only vaguely remember most of the events involved; a part of her, still a little sore, still a little tender, wondered if there was _another_ scrapbook up in those shelves. A scrapbook that was more about the girls and _their_ friends than Josh and his.

Every so often, Ashley would stop her and point to a picture, tapping at it as she explained the context. “Those are some of the guys’ friends—uhh…think that’s Luke, he was a douche, um, oh, and that’s Brody, also a douche, and that’s…” or “They kept messing around even though we were _right up against_ the falls, and like, I was having a heart attack the _whole_ time…” and more than once, “That one…would take wayyy too long to explain.” Her delight was clear as day as they kept turning the pages, the faces in the photographs growing younger and younger, the fashion regressing _horribly_ to the denimy days of the early 2000’s.

Right near the middle of the book, though, Sam forced her to stop. Spread across four pages of alternating paper, black and vibrant orange, were the Halloweens. From the looks of it, there seemed to be snapshots from at _least_ six different Halloweens, some taken during dark trick-or-treat expeditions, some taken at brightly lit parties, still others with the familiar backdrop of rusting blue lockers.

Sam laughed as she looked through each of them, her fingers absently tracing the outline of a 3D jack-o-lantern sticker on one of the pages. “Man, that’s a lot of group costumes, huh?”

As though the thought was only just occurring to her, Ashley bent down closer to the pages, the curve of her smile growing into something that suggested fond memories. “Yeah, well…you’d be surprised how easy it is for us. Dark-haired guy, light-haired guy, girl,” she ticked each one off on her fingers, rolling her eyes all the while. “Pretty much every media franchise _ever_ , actually.”

“That makes sense.” Her own smile grew hooked, then, and when Ashley met her gaze, Sam had to stifle a laugh. “Hmm…” She pretended to turn thoughtful while looking down at the photographs. Tapping her finger against one, then another, then another, she pursed her lips and made a quiet humming sound. “None of these…are my favorite…hmm…I wonder…” It was only then that Ashley understood (and groaned loudly); Sam flipped to the other side of the Halloween spread, and there it was.

The _Twilight_ picture.

The original.

The masterpiece.

Depending on how you looked at it, the photo itself was very, _very_ good…or very, _very_ bad. If you’d’ve asked any of them, they’d tell you it was impossible to recall precisely _who_ had come up with the idea. But like most terrible ideas hatched up in a high school cafeteria, it had stuck like superglue once spoken into the universe. So the three of them had shown up at school, painstakingly costumed as the _Twilight_ assholes.

Ashley had spent the whole day biting her lip, eyes vacant and glazed; Josh had found himself what could only be described as the worst shirt ever, screen printed with the image of rippling six-pack abs, and he furrowed his brow and glared angrily at every- and anyone who walked past them; but it was Chris who had really gone the extra mile, Chris who had taken great pains to obtain body glitter and leave his glasses at home so that he was _forced_ to squint broodingly all day long.

It had been, in a word, _horrible_.

Sam was in her glory. Ashley was not.

“God, I love this picture.”

“You’re the worst. Like actually the worst.”

“For real, I’m not even joking, it’s my favorite thing ever. I think it’s Chris’s subtle shimmering that really puts it over the edge. Did this make it into the yearbook? You guys should’ve won some kind of award for it.”

“Ugh!”

“One of these days, I’m gonna need one of you guys to send me a copy of this so I can make it my desktop, screensaver, wallpaper, and just frame and hang it.”

Ashley’s response was a tired sigh and a pointed turning of the page. “Josh _would_ ,” she admitted, defeated. “I’m pretty sure he keeps a stack of eight-by-ten glossies of it in his room, just in case a need arises.”

She snickered, glancing around the first floor while Ashley was distracted. There was still no sign of the guys…were they _still_ messing around in the back? As sneakily as she was able, Sam checked the time on her phone. They were cutting it _pretty_ close. When she turned her attention back to the scrapbook, she was literally _shocked_ to see how young the faces on the pages were. “Wow, these go back a long way, huh?” she asked, taking it upon herself to flip to the very beginning. “You guys were _tiny_ in some of these, jeez!”

“Yeah, I guess.” Ashley cocked her head to the side, opening and then shutting her mouth. Slowly, she sat back against the couch cushions, looking down at the album with a distant, unreadable sort of expression. She was still smiling, but only just—it was more a _hint_ of a smile, really, a wistful upturn of the corners of her lips. “You know, it’s weird. I can’t really remember a time without those dorks.” Her mouth tightened again as she thought. “It’s like we’ve _always_ kind of been friends.”

“The Three Muskateers,” Sam joked.

Ashley let out a tiny huff of a laugh at that. “ _Suuure_. More like the Three Stooges, honestly.” The wistful look was back. Even _she_ was aware of it, but there wasn’t anything she could do to fight it. Things had been… _‘difficult’_ was maybe a good word, or _‘tense,’_ ever since the lodge…and really, maybe _before_ the lodge, too. She wasn’t about to say that to Sam, obviously, and things had admittedly been getting better…still. Ashley pushed the thought from her head, mentally shaking herself out; this was supposed to be adorable and fun! She had to stop getting so stupidly introspective, so stuck in her own head. Looking over to Sam again, she raised her eyebrows knowingly, “Did I ever tell you _how_ I met these doofuses?”

Sam grinned and shut the scrapbook, taking it from Ashley. “Nope. Can I guess, first?”

“Um, okay, sure. Shoot,” she laughed, watching Sam get up and approach the bookshelf.

“Hmm…” The space where the scrapbook had come from was obvious, a gaping chasm between other books, and still she pretended she had to search for it. Sam’s eyes scanned the spines, trying to find one that was similar in any way, shape, or form to the scrapbook. “It was someone’s birthday, and you all ended up at the same laser tag place.”

“Nope!”

The idea of a book of photos of the twins had nestled its way deep into the folds of her brain, sinking its claws in and refusing to let go. None of the others _looked_ like the scrapbook, though. Not even close. “Um…your mom didn’t want you to skip any grades, but you got put in a class a couple levels ahead, and you met them there?”

Ashley giggled appreciatively at that. “Nah. You’re getting warmer, though.”

“Oh yeah?” Her fingers drummed against the cover of the book. “Hmm…Chris walked into the wrong class one day and nearly exploded from being embarrassed, and you just _had_ to track him down in the hall to make fun of him.” As if it were an afterthought, she added, “Did you guys make this book, by the way?”

There was a rustle from the couch as Ashley repositioned herself, stretching out her legs and nestling herself in the crook of one of its armrests. “No and no,” she answered, turning to watch Sam slide the scrapbook back into its place. “Chris’s mom made it—you know how she is with that crafty stuff.”

Ah. Of course. She nodded, mostly to herself, and put it back on the shelf before taking her spot on the couch again. There _wouldn’t_ be one of the twins, then. That was probably for the best.

“We actually met because of drama club, way back in middle school.” Her gaze had taken on a somewhat distant quality, her teeth scraping against her lower lip in thought; only after a significant beat of silence did she seem to snap back to herself. “I—wait, what’s with the look?”

Sam blinked. “… _drama club_.”  
  
“…yeah? Why’s that weird for you?”

Her eyes narrowed faintly in concentration. “I’m…I’m trying to picture… _any of you_ , really, on stage. Acting. It’s not…it’s not great, if I’m being honest.” Her teeth were bared in a grimace until Ashley laughed again.

“No! Nononono, oh my g—no. Not acting. I could _never_ get up in front of that many people, I have _nightmares_ about that!” As if to prove her point, her body wracked with shudders. “Nu-uh, no way José. Mom really wanted me to do some, y’know, extracurricular stuff, and it wasn’t like I was gonna do a sport,” she scoffed dismissively. “So I signed up to be part of the crew for the drama club. Lights and sets and that kinda stuff. Got stuck painting backdrops for like two weeks, and Josh was one of the older kids working on them, too.”

“Oh God, what was _Chris_ working on? Please don’t say anything electrical.”

She snorted, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. “Ohhh…don’t you worry. No one trusted Chris with _anything_.” Her eyes slid back to Sam’s, her expression somehow both amused and exasperated—the look _most_ of them took on, when Chris was involved. “He wasn’t even _in_ the club.”  
  
“…Okay, huh?”

“Mhm. He just like. Ended up hanging around after school where we met so that he could bug Josh. Predictable, huh?” Despite her tone, her smile was wide, “Really, I don’t even know _why_ they ended up even talking to me. I was pretty quiet—”

“ _Was?_ ”

She stuck her tongue out at Sam before waving at her to shut up. “I probably laughed at the right joke or something stupid like that. But we started hanging out after that! I mean, okay, chances are good they realized I’d do their homework for them if they asked nicely enough, but…they’re stuck with me now.”

“Forever and ever,” Sam added. “Man, no offense, but those sets must’ve been… _rough_ to look at.”

“Rude! They were actually pretty decent for, you know, middle school stuff. Between you and me, I think that’s the only reason they kept Josh around. He was—still is, I guess— _such_ a snot to everyone there. He did this _awful_ impression of the drama teacher, Mr. Lombardi, and it wasn’t even _funny_ —”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Not for the first time in that conversation, Sam had to stop her, raising her hands up. “Stop. Rewind. _What_ about Josh?”

Ashley nodded, “Yeah, it was a _really_ bad impression. It was super mean, and I don’t care _what_ he and Chris say, it didn’t sound _anything_ like him!”

“No, Ash, I…no. I meant you made it sound like he was _good_ at painting the sets.”

For a few seconds, Ashley just looked at her. Sam had to wonder if she hadn’t heard her, or hadn’t understood her, or what. But before she could repeat herself, recognition dawned on Ashley’s face. “Oh holy crap. Do you not know?” Her smile resurfaced, excited and gleeful and maybe even a little bit _proud_. “Have you not seen Josh’s art stuff?”

“Art stuff?” Her eyebrows shot up.

Three notes, high and glassy, rang out through the house, echoing through the empty rooms. Nearly moving in perfect unison, Ashley and Sam turned towards the general direction of the front door, their view obscured by the living room wall. Both frowned at the prospect of having to get up and answer it, but no sooner had Ashley pushed herself up from her comfortable slouch than the sunroom door slammed open and shut, one of the guys hurtling through the house like a frightened animal. “ _I got it! I got it!_ ”

Ashley was clearly perplexed as she leaned into the cushions once more. “I really worry about them, sometimes,” she said, more to the air than to Sam.

The two of them continued to stare at the wall, straining their ears to try and make sense of the low rumble of voices coming from the foyer. But then the front door closed with a _click_ , and a second later Josh popped his head into the living room with a cheery wave. “Ladies.”

“What was _that_ all about?”

“What was _what_ all about?”

Her scowl wasn’t terribly convincing, even as she folded her arms across her chest. “You know. The running through the house thing.”

Josh squinted, and then pretended to only just understand her. “Oooh, that! Yeah, don’t worry about it, Ash. No big. What’re you two up to?”

Jumping in before Ashley could ask him to explain, Sam smiled mischievously. “Hey so, it was just revealed to me that you’re an artist.” She turned to Josh, throwing her arms out to her sides. “When was _this_ going to be shared with the class?”

“We talking about _arteests?!_ ” Chris appeared from behind Josh, his face already reddened by sun. “Y’know, I consider myself one of the greats, really. At least as far as comedy is concerned.”

“Uh huh,” Josh answered flatly, “You’re a regular Pauly Shore.” He looked to Sam, but his eyes kept flicking towards the sunroom in a way Ashley didn’t particularly like. They were doing _very little_ to help quell her suspicions. “I dunno, Sammy, it’s nothing big. Sometimes shit is doodled, what can you do?”

“Oh, we’re talking about _you_. Of course. We’re _always_ talking about you.” Chris pantomimed heaving a great, melodramatic sigh. “Guy spends his _whole life_ learning the complicated craft of telling a quality joke, and what’s he get? Nothin’. Guy can draw a hand and suddenly he’s fuckin’ Michelangelo.”

“I—whoa. What the fuck, Cochise. Have _you_ ever tried to draw a hand, you sonuvabitch? Fucking… _you_ draw a hand that actually _looks_ like a hand, and then get back to me.” Tightening his mouth into a humorless line, he looked back to Sam. “How ‘bout this, Sammy—next time I’m in the market to draw someone like one of my French girls, yours’ll be the first number I call, huh? Sound like a deal?” He dropped her a lascivious wink, and Sam made a sound stuck halfway between a laugh and a groan.

Even from behind Josh, Chris’s pout was obvious. “You never offer to draw _me_ like one of your French girls.”

Ashley was _done with it._ “Nope. Nope. Stop. Just…everyone stop.” To her surprise, everyone _did_ stop talking. She let the room marinate in the silence for a breath or two, inspecting each of their faces carefully. “You’re all being really, _really_ weird today. Weirder than usual,” she added quickly, robbing either of the boys of their chance to interrupt her. “First, you come back from the store with _way_ too much food. Then, you disappear out back for a _conspicuously_ long time. Now, someone shows up at the door and you’re just pretending like they didn’t. It _feels_ like there’s some joke going on that I’m not in on, and I gotta be honest—really not digging it.” She pursed her lips and looked between the three of them again, shoulders rising and falling with a deep breath. “And I’m _not_ just being paranoid, so don’t even _try_ that. What the _heck_ is going on?”

The others exchanged their own rapid series of looks: Josh looked to Chris, who shrugged towards Sam, who rolled her eyes at Josh. Finally, he turned to Ashley, tapping his fingers thoughtfully against his chin. “Well…I mean…I _guess_ we could probably just…get on with this, huh?” He smirked, holding his right arm out in front of him, acting as if he was checking a nonexistent watch. “It’s about that time, I think.”

“‘Bout that time!” Chris parroted, clapping his hands before rubbing them together like some sort of gremlin.

“Sounds like a plan!” With a sly smile of her own, Sam took Ashley’s elbow, pulling her up and off the couch with her.

Unexpected. Ashley’s attention bounced back and forth between them all, hesitating against Sam trying to lead her out of the living room. “Uh, okay, I take it back. I don’t want to know.”

“Mmm…I think you do, though,” Sam laughed, managing to get her over the threshold into the kitchen.

She made a low, warbling keening sound when Chris took her other elbow. “Nooo, I don’t like this! Why does this feel like you’re dragging me to the electri—oh my _God!_ ” Her vision went dark when Josh, having stepped behind her, covered her eyes with his hands. “If you throw me in the pool, I swear to _God_ , you guys—”

“No one’s throwing you in the pool.” Chris found Sam’s eyes and rolled his own. “Stop _worrying_ so much.”

Another anxious noise.

“Really, Ash? Really?” Assuming his best grown-up tone, Josh spoke directly into her ear, hands still over her face. “You think we’d do that to you? You think we’d grab you, drag you outside, into the sunlight…” he smirked widely when they did, in fact, step out into the backyard, the bright sun falling on them all, no doubt warming Ashley’s face, “Get you _riiiight_ up to the edge of the pool, and… _shove_ you in?” He nodded to Chris and Sam, who released her arms, and then jokingly pressed one of his hands between Ashley’s shoulders, applying _just_ enough pressure to trick her into thinking he was going to push her.

The effect was immediate—she shouted, scrabbling back against the wall the three of them had formed, whipping her head around when Josh dropped his hands from her eyes.

In reality, she wasn’t anywhere near the pool. They stood only a yard or so from the house, on the cement paving that _surrounded_ the pool, but even then they were well behind the deck chairs and chaises lounges around the perimeter. Mouth still open from her squeal, Ashley felt her face screw up in confusion; there were other people in the yard. A few farther back where the grass began and there were some yard games set up, one or two around the tiki bar next to the house, someone already tanning on a beach towel…

She whirled around to face them (all three grinning ear-to-ear, clearly _exceptionally_ proud of themselves) and stopped cold as she saw the long table just to the side of the door they’d come through. It was already piled high with paper plates and plastic cutlery, napkins and Solo cups, black and gold balloons weighted down but still drifting with each breeze. Four _gargantuan_ Mylar balloons floated in the center: 2 0 1 4. Wordlessly, she looked to them.

Sam was the first to say something, spreading her arms out wide in the universal signal for ‘ _ta-daaaa!_ ’ “Surprise!”

“Wha…what?” she blinked, still not _fully_ comprehending, the pieces not quite lining up the right way.

“Jamie said you weren’t like, _planning_ on doing a grad party or anything, so,” Chris shrugged, still beaming, still obviously pleased. “ _Mayyyybe_ we took matters into our own hands. Not sure who all these randos are, though…what assholes, sneaking into Josh’s backyard, eating all the canopies—”

Distracted though she was, Ashley found she was nonetheless able to correct him. “ _Canapés_.”

“Bless you.”

It was Josh that she looked to last, Josh with his knowing smirk and loose shrug. “What can I say? Haven’t been to many _Brown_ parties that get crazier than like... _Scrabble_ tournaments and buffalo chicken dip, so we thought to ourselves, ‘Hey, how better to celebrate our girl Ash leaving the _dreadful_ halls of high school adolescence and entering the still pretty awful halls of college anxiety…than with a Josh-Wash production, huh?’” He snickered in his self-assured way, looking from Sam to Chris and back to Ashley. “I mean, why party like a mathlete when you can party like a, uh…”

“ _Rich_ mathlete?” Sam offered.

“Oh yeah, good one Sammy, that’s _exactly_ what I was looking f—”

“Porn star?” Chris said, speaking with all the confidence of someone giving a wrong answer on _Family Feud_.

Josh slowly turned to Chris, eyebrows drawn up and in, seeming pained. “Uh huh. Okay. Yeah, sure, fine, whatever. Why party like a mathlete when you can party like a porn star. Okay. Good. Let’s party like we’re fuckin’ porn stars, then, _sure,_ Cochi—” Not for the first time, he was cut off as he tried to talk. Josh rocked back on his heels as a sudden weight was launched against him, and he stumbled back a step or two to keep his balance.

Ashley had thrown her arms around him, hands locked behind his neck in a desperate, grasping squeeze. It took him a second to comprehend what was going on, but when he did, Josh chuckled quietly, returning the hug with one arm while waving the other two over.

“Yeah, bring it in—bring it on in, you saps.” There was an awkward moment of scrambling to find positions that didn’t squish anyone _too_ badly. “Are you _crying?_ ” Josh asked Ashley after a moment, craning his head to try and get a better look at her. It was no use, she’d already buried her face in his shoulder, so he just snorted a laugh. “Oh my _God_ , Ash. This is no time to _cry!_ There are _guests_ you need to _mingle_ with, and snacks to eat, fucking Cornhole to play, a giant goddamn pool…”

When she looked back up, effectively beginning to disentangle their messy group-hug, Ashley wiped at her cheeks with her hands, lower lip quivering enough to be noticed. She snuffled once, even as Sam hugged her harder from the side. “You guys,” she started, voice dropping off midway through. “I—this is the _nicest_ thing anyone’s _ever_ done for me.”

“ _The_ nicest, huh?” Josh asked. “Man, if that’s true, sounds like you need to get some better friends.”

She laughed and hugged him again. **  
**

*******

**3:50pm**

“I just don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?”

“I don’t get how you can eat something called a ‘veggie dog.’” To drive the point home, he pretended to gag, tongue lolling out of his mouth. “The thought of biting into a hotdog and getting a mouthful of tofu is absolutely _abhorrent_.”

Instead of rolling her eyes, Sam locked her stare on Chris, pointedly taking an unnecessarily large bite out of her hotdog. His reaction was immediate disgust; she covered her mouth with one hand when she couldn’t keep from laughing, hiding her mouthful from him. “You’re totally out of your mind— _real_ hotdogs are the grossest thing on Earth! At least you _know_ what’s in a veggie dog. Do you have _any_ idea what’s in a _meat_ hotdog?”

He nodded, “Actually, Sam? Actually, yeah, I do. Meat. What we as humans have been eating since we discovered fire.”

“Been eating plants since _before_ fire…”

“Meat has _protein_ , Sam. And protein, as we all know, is what a body _needs_. Gives you energy, gives you muscle—”

“And how’s _that_ working out for you?” She sneered mockingly as he turned to face her more fully, eyes wide with unanticipated insult.

“Um…wow? Okay, okay, I see what you’re doing. Oppressing the carnist.”

“Chris, I _promise_ …you do _not_ deserve to be oppressed because you eat meat.” She adjusted herself on her seat, patting his knee affectionately. “There are _so many other_ reasons why you deserve it. Meat doesn’t even make the list.”

He let out an appreciative hum as he finished taking a drink, setting his beer down on the tiki bar. “Oh…you’re gonna need to back off if you’re thinking of usurping me as the comedian of the gang. I’ll fucking take you down.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm, and it’ll be brutal.”

Sam crunched a potato chip, spinning in her stool so she faced the rest of the yard. “I’m positively _quaking_ in fear.” One leg moved to cross over the other, and Sam balanced her paper plate atop it, lazily picking at her chips. Across the yard, over where a handful of newcomers were starting up a new game of… _something_ (she couldn’t quite tell from the distance, reminding her _why_ they referred to the property as ‘The Washington Estate”), she spotted Josh and Ashley talking to a couple people, Josh’s elbow resting on Ashley’s shoulder, Ashley’s hands moving aimlessly as she spoke. She sighed contentedly and took another bite. “I think we did good,” she nodded towards the two of them to direct Chris’s gaze. “I think she’s having a good time.”

He overshot the amount of effort it would take to turn around in his stool, spinning around once before slowly coming to rest in basically the same position as Sam. “Yeah…I think so too.” Chris didn’t say it aloud, choosing to let sleeping dogs lie, but there was a twist of something else in his voice, a bright, springy sort of something. Sam suspected it was relief—she smiled along with him instead of bringing it up. They sat quietly like that for a few minutes, occasionally waving or calling hello to someone they knew or sort-of-knew or even vaguely recognized, as the politics of high school graduation parties dictated. Someone pulled a truly gruesome cannonball from the pool’s diving board, and the resounding _smack_ of flesh against the water, in addition to the communal “ _Oooooooh_ ” that rose up around the poor fool seemed to finally shake something loose from Chris. “Man, I am... _psyched_ this is going so well. I’ve, uh…I’ve been kinda…worried.”

An eyebrow raise, and nothing more. “Oh yeah?” Sam took a slow drink of her soda.

Chris’s smile was tight for a moment. “Yeah, it’s…stupid.” He shook his head but the thought was firmly lodged. He’d already opened his mouth and started this, he figured he might as well finish it. “I’m just…I guess I’m just glad they’re getting along, that’s all.” Sam didn’t ask who he meant, and he was unspeakably grateful for it. “Shit’s coming back together. It’s good.”

Without thinking too heavily on it, Sam set her head against Chris’s shoulder, leaning herself comfortably against him as she ate her chips. “I think it’s pretty common knowledge that the healing process is _greatly_ sped along with parties and cupcakes.” At ‘healing process,’ her hand made an arc in the air.

“Truer words have never been spoken.” Per her reminder, he grabbed the cupcake off of his plate and proceeded to eat all of the icing first, like some sort of heathen. He ignored Sam’s sound of displeasure until he’d managed to swallow most of it; when he stuck his tongue out at her, it was stained electric blue. “And uh,” he said, trying and failing to sound casual, “Seems like Josh is doing better.”

Her laughter tapered off into a quiet hum of acknowledgement. Sam took another drink, tapping a chip against her paper plate.

Brow furrowing, Chris looked down to her as best her could, what with her head against his shoulder. “You don’t think so?”

She shrugged, similarly trying and failing to appear unconcerned. “You’d know better than me.”

Silence between them. Just for a second, just for a _moment_ …but long enough to communicate what it had to. “I guess,” he mumbled, biting into the cupcake in earnest, his tone suggesting he wasn’t quite as sure as she was.

As though on cue, Josh sauntered over to them, dipping around the other side of the tiki bar. He’d disappeared for a moment, rummaging through the mini-fridge, before popping back up with a drink, splaying his hands to either side of him on the bar. “What’ll it be?” he chuckled.

“Mmm, so you’re taking up drink-making, huh?” Sam swiveled around in her seat again. “Think you can maybe whip me up a Shirley Temple? I’ve been waiting like… _allllll day_. Or is that gonna be too challenging for you?”

Scoffing, he popped just below the bar again, the clinking of glass bottles and aluminum cans audible as he dug through the fridge. “Too challenging… _clearly_ , Miss Giddings, you don’t know who I am. _I_ …am the best goddamned bartender from Timbuktu to Portland, Maine.” He paused for effect. “Or Portland, Oregon, for that matter.” He smirked and then promptly frowned when both of them simply continued chewing their food. “…Uh, hello? _The Shining?_ Really? I know you fucks have seen it—we watched it _together_.”

“ _Ooooh!_ ” Chris said, nodding vigorously. “Yeah, no, I got nothing. Sorry we don’t all have weird movie encyclopedia memories like you.”

He grumbled something in response, but was already throwing ice in a glass for Sam’s drink.

“I hope you’re making one for me, too.”

“Will you cool your metaphorical jets, man? I’ll make you a girly drink if you want it.”

“Shirley Temples are not _girly_ ,” Sam interjected.

“Uh, they’re named after _Shirley Temple_ , Samantha. One of the girliest of girls. Ergo, girly drink.” Josh paused, dangling a maraschino cherry over the glass by its stem, “Did you know if you add booze to one of these, they call it a ‘Dirty Shirley’?”

Sam cringed. “Ick.”

“Hey, let Shirley get as dirty as she wants. This is a free country.” Chris glanced momentarily over his shoulder, scoping out the party situation. “Shindig’s off and popping, as the kids say.”

Sam cringed _again_. “ _Double_ ick.”

“Oh, it’s popping all right,” Josh agreed, sliding Sam her drink with a wink and a blown kiss. “But hey, so…Cochise?”

“Mhm?”

When Chris didn’t turn around, Josh scooted over so that he was directly across from him, elbows on the bar. “Chris.”

“Yeah?”

“Christopher. Bro. Buddy. Dude. My one and only.”

At that, he _did_ turn back around, pulling back slightly at Josh’s proximity. “Uh…hi?”

Smile widening into something decidedly worrisome, Josh cocked his head to the side. He heaved a loud, wistful sigh—the sort cartoon characters made when dreaming about the objects of their affection. “I’m gonna make you your Shirley, truly I am, but before I do…I got just…just a tiny, little, itty-bitty, super inconsequential, low-pressure question to ask you, _my dude_.”

Chris straightened up, anxiety blooming brilliantly across his face. Sam stopped mid-sip of her drink to watch. Her eyes flit back and forth from Chris and Josh as though watching a spirited game of tennis.

“So…while me and Sammy were off getting the groceries,” he began, looking down to examine his nails. “What is it— _exactly_ —that you and our lovely Miss Brown got up to?” He raised his eyes to Chris’s face again, smirk still firmly in place. “Inquiring minds simply _must_ know.”

Sam frowned in confusion, fixing her gaze more squarely on Chris. At first, she had assumed it was nothing more than another of Josh’s jabs at Chris’s crush on Ashley, but then Chris opened his mouth, seemed to search for his words, and then shut his mouth again, and she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it wasn’t. “Oh my God,” she said, lowering her voice into a conspiratorial whisper, hunching over the bar to be closer to both of them. “Something happened. What happened?”

“Noth— _nothing happened!_ ”

“Oh, he’s lying,” Sam said to Josh.

“ _Obviously_.” They both turned on him, vipers lining up deathly strikes, eyes trained and teeth bared. “Don’t you lie to me, Christopher—don’t you lie to _Sam_. We don’t deserve that.”

“Yeah, tell us the truth. We can…” she grinned widely, shooting Josh a deliberate look. “We _can_ handle the truth.”

His expression was pitying, at best. “I appreciate the effort, Sammy, but we’ll work on it.” He patted her hand once, still mainly focused on Chris. “We can do this the easy way, the hard way, or the _really_ embarrassing way.”

Chris had intended to scowl at them, really he had, but had managed something that was more of an insolent pout. “What’s the easy way?”

“Uh, you just…fucking tell us.”

He eyed Josh warily. “What’s the hard way?”

“I push you off the stool, drag you over to the water, and dunk your face in until you crack.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What’s the embarrassing way?”

Never flinching, Josh calmly blinked. “I turn off the music and use the stereo system to broadcast a message to the entire party that you and Ash were doing _untoward activities_ in my home while I was away.”

The pout deepened noticeably. “Okay, two can play at this—what were _you guys_ doing while you were out at the store, huh? _Huh?_ Took you an awful long time to get back—”

Straw in her mouth, Sam shrugged. “Orgy in the produce section. Like three cashiers joined in. Scandalous. Upset a _lot_ of soccer moms and destroyed a _lot_ of kale in the process,” she said with a voice so flat and matter-of-fact that Chris nearly fell out of his stool. Josh was _howling_ with laughter. She giggled and rolled her eyes, “We’re just _teasing_ —”

“I’m not,” Josh interrupted. “I’m not teasing _at all_. I mentioned something to Ash, and she got… _real_ cagey on me, and now _you’re_ being a brat, so _something_ happened.” He leaned in even closer to Chris, so that they were nearly nose-to-nose. “I would like very much to know what transpired, my good sir.”

“She was just helping me with my summer reading project! Stop trying to make a federal case out of it, God you two are just…ugh I hate you both.”

“Nu-uh, that’s not it. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter, Cochise. She was helping with your homework, _and then_ …”

“And then _nothing!_ ”

Setting her drink down, Sam huddled even closer. “You’re _still_ lying. Oh my God.”

“I-I’m not—fucking shut up!”

Suddenly deathly serious, Josh raised both eyebrows. Speaking with the sort of calm detachment a dentist might use when reporting a cavity, he simply said, “If I have to find out from a third party source that you banged on my couch—”

Chris _did_ stand then, and would’ve likely beaten a hasty retreat had Josh not grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “You’re so—we— _God_ , just shut _up!_ ”

“ _Triple_ ick. Going for a world record, tonight,” Sam laughed, taking another sip from her straw.

He rounded on her, glad for the distraction, if only for a second. “Wait, uh, excuse me? Why is _that_ an ick? Why is it gross, _Sam?!_ ”

She hadn’t meant to, but she snorted, trying to keep her shoulders from shaking with the louder laughter she fought to tamp down. “Sorry, sorry! It’s weird to think about. Like,” her face crinkled as she thought, “Like thinking about one of your cousins doing it. Ech. Weird. It’s…you’re not like…a _sexual being_ in my head. No offense or anything.”

“I’m at least ninety percent positive Chris and Ash aren’t sexual beings in their _own_ heads, Sammy, so you’re in good company.” Josh only released Chris’s arm when he decided he wasn’t a flight risk. He snickered to himself, finally pouring him his promised drink. “Just watchin’ out for you, bro. Trying to cheer you on from the sidelines. Rah-rah-sis-boom-bah and all that shit.”

He grumbled something way too quietly to be heard, ignoring the drink Josh slid to him. Chris glanced over his shoulder again to reassure himself that Ashley was still out of earshot (as it stood, she and a few of the other Creative Writing girls were a fair bit off, one snapping selfies of the group of them in front of the giant ‘CONGRASHULATIONS’ sign hung near the desserts…no one had found it quite as _hilarious_ as he had hoped). “There was just…a _moment_ earlier. Fuck. If she got weird when you mentioned it, then… _ugh_.”

Almost in perfect unison, Sam and Josh perked back up, exchanging a veiled glance between themselves before looking back to Chris. “A _moment_ , huh?” Sam asked, chewing at her straw. “What, uh…what kinda moment?”

Half of his drink was gone in one gulp. He shook his head, shoulders shrugging helplessly. “A _bad one_ , clearly, if she got ‘cagey.’ Fuck. _Fuck_. I’m an idiot.”

“Well, yeah, you are, that isn’t up for debate here, Cochise…” Josh came around the bar again, nudging Sam until she moved one seat over; he plunked himself down on the stool between the two of them, reaching behind himself to grab the beer he’d gotten himself earlier. He cracked it open and took a drink, purposefully swiveling all the way around to watch Ashley and the other partygoers. “I’m gonna keep guessing until you tell us.” Beside him, Sam laughed, and his smile only widened.

“Dude, fucking—”

“ _No_ , you already said there was no fucking, so stop trying to throw me off. Hmm…this is like Twenty Questions or some shit. Were hands involved?”

“I—” Chris’s brow furrowed. “Wait, what is it with you guys and _hands?_ ”

“Taking that as a no. Moving on. Were there _feet_ involved?”

“Wh— _no!_ ”

“I’m not here to kinkshame. I mean, I can’t speak for Sammy, but I _assume_ she isn’t, either.”

“Oh let me die, God.” There was a _thunk_ as Chris set his head down on the tiki bar itself, trying to will himself to melt into the fake wood. “Please take me now, Jesus, I’m ready.”

“Was there an emotional heart-to-heart?”

“You’re assholes.”

Josh rolled his eyes. “God _damn_ it, man, I’m running out of shit to accuse you of. This is growing lamer and lamer by the second. Uh, okay, hmm…oh, oh, were hot makeout sessions involved?”

He cringed into himself, doubling down on his mental pleas to God. “No.”

The pause hadn’t been long. It hadn’t been particularly noticeable. But it had been _there_. Josh and Sam’s heads snapped to him quickly enough to cause whiplash, and Sam came close to climbing _into_ Josh’s lap to shove Chris’s shoulder. “Did you _kiss Ash?!_ ” she hissed, eyes bright and grin wide enough to show her back teeth. “Did you guys freaking _kiss?!_ ”

Watching him carefully, Josh shook his head, “No…they didn’t.”

“No,” Chris agreed, “We didn’t.”

“But you came _real_ , real close, huh?” Josh leaned back, giving Sam more room as she loomed over him, jokingly blowing a light stream of air into her ear, causing her to pull back and smack his arm. “Aw, lookit you, buddy,” he knocked one of his knees against Chris’s stool. “Growing up right in front of our eyes. I’m so proud.” He pretended to sniffle affectionately. “She prolly got all weird when I asked because she was pissed you _didn’t_ kiss her, you know,” he added airily, taking another drink. “It’s her _big day_ and you left her high and dry. Rude, Cochise, real rude.”

“There’s literally _no_ way she wanted to kiss me.”

If ever there was a moment where two human beings approached true, pure telepathy, it was _that_ moment, as Sam and Josh turned to each other, eyebrows raised in exasperation. After a beat, Sam shook her head, gesturing in a vague way that suggested they let the topic drop. Josh rolled his eyes in lieu of a reply, but let it go all the same. “Ohoho…” he said, tone changing significantly. “Well looky, looky…and here I was, thinking this was gonna be a nerds-only ordeal.”

Sam spun around first, then Chris followed (albeit apprehensively), both more than just a little surprised to see Jessica and Matt walk in from the front of the house.

“Wow.” There was a hint of derision in Chris’s tone, even as he joined the other two in half-waving to them from across the yard. “Didn’t expect _them_.” He lifted his drink to his mouth and then froze, “Does that mean _Emily_ is coming?”

“Does that mean _Mike’s_ coming?” Sam asked, the intensity of her scorn surprising her just as much as the boys. **  
**

Josh set his beer down without so much as another sip, folding his arms across his chest. “I know this is hard for you two dumbos, but just, for one moment, please try and use your critical thinking skills. Why…in _God’s name_ …would I invite Mike or Emily to a party for _Ash?_ ” Using one of his feet, he rocked himself side-to-side slowly on his stool. “She likes Matt and Jess, she doesn’t like Emily or Mike. Why would I even consider sending either of them an e-vite, huh? I ask you. What logic is there in that?”

The implications of what he said took a moment to sink in, but when they did, both Chris and Sam blinked in surprise. They huddled a little closer together into a semi-circle to keep from being overheard. Chris let out a quiet whistle—the sort one might make if supremely impressed (or supremely concerned). “Uh oh…” he said, his childishly jeering sing-song reverberating through the glass as he spoke from over the rim. “You split up their group.” Eyebrow raised, he shot Josh a look that seemed, at first blush, almost suspicious. “Bold move. Stupid. But definitely bold.”

“Oh _please_.”

“You _never_ split the group, man. I thought you _knew_ that.”

Sam snorted a laugh, leaning backwards against the tiki bar, propping her elbows up on the tabletop. “How _brave_ of you!” She kept her gaze fixed on a vague point in middle space, somewhere just above the pool, if only to keep from looking directly at either of the guys. “Man, you better stay off Facebook for the next few days, if you know what’s good for you. Em might have some words for you.”

“Pfft, yeah, sure. C’mon, what’s she gonna do—write a mean status about me? Start a rude hashtag? Please. I think I can handle more than a little vagueblogging at this point in my life.” He rolled his eyes, continuing to twist back and forth on the stool. “Besides…like she and Mike would even _deign_ to grace us with their collective presence. And anyway, I heard me a little rumor on the interwebs.” He paused for dramatic effect, folding his arms across his chest. “Sounds like maybe _that_ group’s splitting _itself_ up all on their own. No outside help required. Isn’t _that_ tragic?” Conveniently, the answer let him omit an uncomfortable truth: _He_ didn’t want to have to look at either of their faces, didn’t want to hear their voices.

He’d been thinking a lot about Hill and his little blame game, the past few weeks.

_A lot_.

Across the yard, they watched as Ashley (clearly just as surprised as the three of them) hugged Jess and then Matt, mouth moving with words they couldn’t hear over the music pumping through the speakers.

Reaching over, Josh shoved Chris with an arm. He nodded towards Ashley and Matt hugging and smirked. “Bet you’re wishing you kissed her _now_ , eh, Cochise?”

*******

**9:14pm**

The water of the pool was nearly black as ink under the night sky, dappled with constellations from the fairy lights strung up around the backyard. Arms spread wide, eyes closed, Sam let herself simply float; the world around her smelled like bonfire smoke and charcoal and chlorine, felt like cool balm against the beginnings of her sunburn, tasted like sweat and sticky-sweet cherry juice. She thought she could’ve slept like that, if given the chance. As she drifted, something brushed against one of her outstretched arms, bringing her back to herself. Lifting her head from the water, the sounds of the yard immediately returned to her, replacing the thick silence of the water with low, murmuring voices and whatever weird music Josh was streaming through the speakers.

“This has just been… _ridiculous_.” Ashley treaded water next to her, only dimly lit by the lights. Her hair seemed very dark against her skin, slicked back away from her face. “I’ve never been thrown a _surprise_ party before—I feel like a little kid.”

“Hey, graduating’s a big deal! If _that_ doesn’t deserve a few streamers and balloons, what _does?_ ” She laughed right along with her, scooping her own hair out of her face with a cringe. There was a _real_ prune situation going on with her fingers. “ _Plus_ …” she slowly swam backwards as they talked, leading Ashley towards the edge of the pool. “Now you get to come join _me_ on campus. _Also_ celebration-worthy!” She put both of her elbows up onto the rim of the pool, pulling herself up and onto the pavement with a watery _woosh_. “Think of it—I can show you the places to avoid in the dining halls, which floors of the library are haunted…the quintessential college experience.”

Ashley propped her arms up onto the pool’s edge, but remained in the water, the old band tee she’d worn over her one-piece drifting behind her like a fin (Sam hadn’t mentioned it; it was the sort of thing that felt best left unaddressed). Her face was bright under the glow of the fairy lights, her cheeks and nose darkened with sun. “It’s so nuts, right? You should let me know what classes you schedule—wouldn’t that be so fun to have one together? God…class in a _lecture hall_ …”

She wrung out her ponytail over the pool, snickering tiredly. “Oh Ash,” Sam sighed, “It’s gonna lose its charm _real_ quick, hate to be the bearer of bad news.” She reached over for the pile of clothes she’d left on one of the lounge chairs, shaking her hoodie out before zipping it up over her swimsuit. The night was still warm, but the breeze felt _Arctic_ , having just gotten out of the water. “Well, wait, you _are_ sort of a dork…maybe it _won’t_ wear off for you.”

“Oh har-de-har-har.” Ashley smacked the water, sending a small crest up to splash at Sam’s feet. She turned back towards the house, resting her cheek against one of her arms as she watched the small huddle near the food.

The party had cooled down to only a handful of late-comers and stragglers, mostly friends of the guys’. Three or four of them leaned against the house and the tables, having some energetic conversation. Every so often, even over the music, a swell of guffawing laughter could be heard.

“Whaddya think the bozos are up to?” Sam followed Ashley’s line of sight before turning back to her.

“Something stupid, probably.” There was a fondness in her eyes that was almost heartbreaking in its openness.

Sam found it positively contagious. “Yeah, well _duh_. Obviously.” She wrapped her arms around herself against the faint chill, narrowing her eyes minutely when one of the group gestured in a way that appeared… _confrontational?_ It was hard to tell, but the laughter that followed wasn’t quite as raucous. A moment later, he split off from them entirely and disappeared around the side of the house. “Know what? I’m gonna get myself another drink and check it out. You want anything?” When Ashley shook her head in the negative, Sam slid her feet into her boat shoes and casually began making her way to the bar and its cooler.

“Oh, wait, if you’re going over there…”

She glanced over her shoulder to Ashley again.

Sheepishly grinning, she released the edge of the pool, pushing herself towards the middle again. “Could you just _please_ change the music? Josh’s taste _sucks_.”

“Oh, definitely. Gotcha covered.” There was a quiet splash behind her as Ashley went under again, leaving Sam to her business. She passed the group of guys as nonchalantly as possible, sneaking only the quickest peek to try and get a read on the situation.

Ah. There it was. Phones piled up on the table next to what was left of the hotdog buns.

There was no need for her to refrain from rolling her eyes, so she really just went wild with it. She wasn’t sure what their obsession with that stupid game was—in _her_ experience, it never really ended well. There wasn’t much left in the cooler, save for melted ice and a few diet Cokes, leaving her to rummage through the bar’s mini-fridge. There, in the back, wedged behind the beer, was a single bottle of water. Divine.

One drink, two, and she realized belatedly how thirsty she really was. Heat and potato chips had a tendency to do that. She all but chugged it down, shivering in contentment. Already she could feel the aches of a good workout thrumming in her muscles, filling her with that breed of sweet summer exhaustion that promised an _excellent_ night’s sleep.

She futzed with the laptop below the bar, closing out of Josh’s weird music stream and grinning to herself as she opened a Disney playlist on YouTube, instead. That was sure to get a laugh or two, right? A few of the people still playing yard games definitely shot a confused look her way when the ambient techno beat was replaced with the opening notes of _Let It Go_. She acted as if she hadn’t noticed.

Another guy broke off from the group. Sam frowned, craning her head to try and get a better look at them. In the dim lighting, it was impossible to see their expressions, but hoo boy, if she was a betting woman, she would’ve put money down on the likelihood shit was starting to go south.

Earlier, when talking to Chris, she’d kept it to herself…but oh, she hoped she was wrong. She’d been sensing a storm, the past couple of weeks, and Lord she prayed she wasn’t about to walk straight into a thunderhead.

She neared the group just in time to hear one of them (Marc? Manny? She had only been half-paying attention earlier when they’d been introduced, and she _definitely_ hadn’t known him that well in school) say in a tense, panicked voice, “No, for real, what did you sen—why is my dad calling me? Dude. _Dude!_ ”

Sam was cringing even _before_ she heard Josh’s response: “That’s why you _delete_ scandalous photos like those from your camera roll, man.”

“ _God_ , fuck this stupid game.” And then he was gone too, anxiously pushing his phone to his ear as he made his hasty retreat.

“You two sure know how to break up a party, huh?” Sans decorum, she wedged herself between Josh and Chris, leaning the small of her back against the table. “I have literally— _literally_ —just watched three people run away from you. What on God’s green Earth have you been _doing_ over here?”

“Hey, it’s called Social _Suicide_ for a reason, Sammy, they know the deal.” Josh moved his shoulders up and down in a shrug, nabbing his own phone off the table and tossing it into the air. He caught it with a flick of his wrist, chuckling lowly. “Can’t stand the heat, get outta the kitchen.”

Her earlier suspicions were confirmed when Chris didn’t _quite_ laugh with him. He made a sound, sure, a quiet huff of sorts, but it wasn’t a _laugh_. Sam sucked a breath through her teeth and smiled through it. “I dunno…I’ve played my fair share, and uh…I’ve never _run away_ like that.” Trying to dispel some of the tension, she nudged them both with her elbows. “Have you dorks been taking it easy on us ladies, all this time? That seems like…super sexist. Just _crazy_ sexist, honestly.”

“I am _hurt_ that you think I would sully the integrity of my own game by playing favorites, Samantha.” Josh nudged her back. “Nah, see, the difference between _you_ and our _grumpy little buddies_ —” he raised his voice loud enough to carry across the yard, the effect made even more noticeable by the song ending, “—is that _you_ don’t have a phone full of God-awful dick pics. At least, not last time I checked, you didn’t.”

“Ah. Now, see, that’s a good point. Didn’t think of it that way.” She glanced up at Chris, who was staring pointedly down at his phone, leaving her to wonder _precisely_ what she’d missed. Only distantly was she aware of the starting percussion of the next song on the playlist, or the thin vein of heat lightning forking the sky off to the east, or the weight of Josh’s arm as he rested it atop her shoulders. “Well…looks like it’s game over, at least. I’d ask who _won_ , but if there’s one thing I know, it’s _no one_ wins Social Suicide.”

“Mmm…” Josh hummed into his bottle before setting it down behind him on the table. “Not quite, Sammy.”

_Aw fuck_ , she thought to herself.

“It’s my turn to ask Chris something.”

_Aw double fuck_.

Far from looking resigned to his fate, Chris turned to look at him over Sam’s head. “Definitely _not_ your turn. It’s _Manny’s_ turn, and he—”

“Bailed. So he forfeits. Which means it’s my turn.”

“Whatever.”

She looked between them, her smile feeling tight at the corners—artificial. It was the thin grimace of a friend-fight civilian finding themselves caught in the crosshairs. Sam had wandered into worse before, she suspected (usually between Hannah and Beth, whose arguments could run the gamut from ridiculous to heart-shattering in a matter of moments), but this wasn’t the time. This wasn’t the place. Not when things had been going so _well_.

She’d never considered herself particularly good at improvising, so when the plan dropped into her head, fully formed and ready to go, she took it as a sign from fate, itself. Did it _probably_ have more to do with the song being blasted from the speakers? Yes. Did she have to admit that? No.

Sam barely had to turn to be right up in Josh’s space, but gestured to get him to duck his head down so she wouldn’t have to stand on tip-toe to scheme with him.

He paused as she whispered her idea to him, face contorting clownishly while he pantomimed mulling the idea over. Josh pulled back slightly, sizing Sam up…and then he nodded and grinned, posture going lax again. “Mk, thanks to the counsel of one Miss Giddings, I _do_ think I have a request of you, Mr. Hartley.”

Chris looked to Sam, who winked as slyly as she was able. Good as her intentions might have been, it didn’t exactly fill him with confidence. “Okay,” he sighed, sounding resigned. “What?”

All he did was nod in the general direction of the pool. “Go take a dip.”

There was silence as Chris eyed him warily. He looked over to the pool, spotted Ashley still swimming, and turned back. “Uh huh, okay, and the catch is…?”

Josh shook his head, spreading his arms and hands wide in a show of innocence. “No catch! Just go swim with Ash, that’s all.”

He shot another cautious glance Sam’s way, a crease forming in his forehead. “And I don’t have to like…do anything outrageous?”

“Nope.”

“I don’t have to _say_ anything?”

“I mean, not if you don’t want to. That’d be pretty fucking awkward though, don’t you think? Just silently doing the butterfly stroke? Sort of creepy.”

“You’re not gonna make me do a dance or get naked?”

“Oh _God_ no.”

It was clear as _day_ that he didn’t trust whatever was going on. Still…he knew that whatever Sam had cooked up was likely _leagues_ better than one of Josh’s dares, and it was probably _only_ for that reason that he muttered a soft, “ _Okay_ ,” and kicked his shoes off, already beginning to tug his shirt off up over his head as he walked away from them.

“This is a good one, Sammy, gotta hand it to ya.” Josh followed her over to the tiki bar, his grin not entirely unlike the Cheshire Cat’s as she cranked the volume as loud as it would go.

Chris had gotten about halfway to the pool when the first ‘ _Sha la la la_ ’s hit; they watched, bursting with delight, as he stopped and turned around to fix them both with an exasperated glare. The music was _way_ too loud for their voices to be heard over it, even when they cupped their hands around their mouths to sing along. But he could see their lips moving. He could see _their_ haphazard choreography. He didn’t _need_ to hear them above the chorus of undersea creatures babbling, ‘ _My oh my, looks like the boy’s too shy, ain’t gonna…kiss the girl._ ’ He set his glasses down on a deck chair, flipped them both the bird, and then dove into the water, disappearing from their view.

Sam lowered the volume back to where it had been before, waving apologetically to the other partygoers through her laughter.

“Why you turning that down? It sh—oh, we going somewhere?” Josh let himself be led to the sunroom’s sliding door, hissing a startled breath as they stepped into the wall of air conditioning. “ _Shit_ , gotta turn that down, huh?” he muttered more to himself than Sam, furrowing his brow while following. “Is this the part where you lure me into a secluded part of the house and murder me? I’ll give it to you—no one _would_ hear the struggle over _The Little Mermaid_ going on out there, but there aren’t a lot of _great_ places to hide a corpse in here, Sammy.”

She rolled her eyes to him with a sigh. “If I was going to kill you, I wouldn’t do it in your own house.”

“Oh no?”

“Nah, I’d find like…a lake or something.”

“Mmm, so they’d have to drain it to find any proof. Good thinking. You _are_ learning!”

Letting go of his arm, Sam undid the front door’s deadbolt, stepping out onto the porch. The front of the house was like a completely different world—the sounds of the backyard were dulled and distant, the view replaced with warm squares of light coming from neighbors’ houses, reflecting off the cars parked all up and down the drive. “I thought maybe a change of scenery would be nice.”

Josh watched the back of her head for a moment, the corners of his eyes crinkling in thought. With one last look at the foyer, he joined her outside again, shutting the front door behind him. “Such a change."

“Figured the quiet might help a little, too.”

“Help with…what, exactly?” He joined Sam at the porch’s railing, drumming his fingers against it. “Did I miss a memo, here? Cuz if you’re trying to set a particular _mood_ here, Sammy, all you had to do was _say_ —”

“Felt like things were getting a little tense back there, that’s all.”

He blinked in surprise, smirk momentarily wiped clean from his face. “Tense? What was…what was tense?” Mentally, he rewound the tape in his head, playing back the past few minutes. “It was just—you mean because the guys fucked off? Sometimes they just get—”

At first, she’d thought he was just playing dumb…but no, no…Sam felt herself frown as it occurred to her that Josh really _hadn’t_ noticed. “I meant with you and Chris.”

He looked at her for a good while, still trying to pinpoint the moment she was talking about. Try as he might, it wasn’t there. “…what?” Trying to laugh it off, he shook his head. “Nah, that’s…things weren’t _tense_ , Sammy.” She didn’t seem to be buying it. _That_ was concerning. It was Josh’s turn to frown as he asked, “Wait… _was_ it?”

She pinched her thumb and forefinger together until only a millimeter of space separated them.

The loose, easy shape of his posture turned into something different, entirely. His shoulders slumped, eyes widening under a creased brow. “…oh.” It felt lame, weak, but nothing else was coming to him. “Oh. Well. Shit. I didn’t…” He looked towards the side of the house, unable to see even a sliver of the party going on. In a rush, he felt his gut knot around itself; if Sam hadn’t mentioned it, he probably wouldn’t have given any of it a second thought. “Shit.” He set his weight against the railing, dropping his head into his hands, fingers tangling in the sides of his hair.

“It wasn’t _bad_ -bad,” she assured him, “Just a little…uncomfortable.”

“Yeah. Getting pretty good at _that_ , huh? Making people uncomfortable.” He let his arms flop down again, hanging over the porch. “That’s what I bring to the table as a friend, you know—obscure film trivia, a nice ass, and the eerie ability to piss _everyone_ off without trying. It’s impressive, really, if you think about it.”

“Can I make a guess about something?” Sam pulled her phone out of her hoodie pocket and checked the time before setting it down on the railing between them. She turned her attention back to Josh, trying to keep her expression neutral. “Were all you guys maybe… _possibly_ …talking about the whole…Chris-and-Ash thing before I showed up?”

His forehead creased again, before recognition flashed across his face. “Oh. Uh. I mean it…probably came up? But c’mon, Sammy, that shit’s so—”

She leaned herself against the railing, staring up into the night sky. “I think…” she began, trailing off and narrowing her eyes; there were a million thoughts swarming in her head like angry mosquitos, each fighting to spear itself into the forefront of her mind, making it difficult to pick her words. “I think that sometimes, being a good friend means not saying what you’re thinking.”

When she turned to him, Sam found Josh watching her with a guarded sort of interest, his eyebrows raised and chin in his hand. “No, no, I’m all ears,” he said, waving her on. “Please, enlighten me, Dr. Giddings. I wanna see where _this_ is going.” For a moment—and only a moment—his usual smirk reappeared, comforting in its familiarity.  
  
Sam rolled her eyes but continued all the same, returning her gaze up to the sky. “I think that the conversations we choose _not_ to have…are just as important as the ones we choose _to_ have. If that makes any sense.” She shifted her weight to her other foot, but didn’t wait for a reply. “When you _don’t_ like someone a lot, I think it’s hard to come right out and read them the riot act to hurt them, even if you _want_ to—you always wonder if you’re getting the message across, or if anything you’re saying is sticking with them. But when you _do_ like someone a lot, when you _do_ care about them, and they _are_ a big part of your life…you know exactly what buttons to press to make them mad or hurt their feelings or embarrass them. You know where they’re vulnerable, you know their…” she gestured vaguely with one hand, grimacing when she couldn’t find the right word, “I don’t want to say _weaknesses_ , but…the things that upset them. The stuff that _you_ know that no one else does. The stuff they’ve let _you_ see, but no one else. And when you’re mad or hurting, I think it’s very, very easy to see those things as big, red bull’s-eyes. What makes you a good friend, a _really_ good friend, is seeing those bull’s-eyes and ignoring them. Walking away from them. Pretending they don’t exist.” She dropped her eyes, the brightness of the stars suddenly too much for her to handle.  
  
Josh was silent.  
  
“That’s what _I_ think, anyway,” she added as a quiet afterthought, tapping the toe of her shoe against the porch absently. “There’s a difference between being honest with your friends and sticking your finger in a wound, you know?”  
  
Had Sam looked back to Josh, she likely would’ve been taken aback by the sudden intensity of his stare. Chin still resting against his hand, he regarded her carefully, mouth set in a thoughtful line. His other arm was beginning to prickle with the telltale pins and needles of falling asleep, but he paid it no mind. Instead, he watched her profile, trying to parse each twitch, each movement, as some sort of microexpression. He had gotten very good at reading people, he often thought to himself, but Sam was still a tough cookie to crumble. Very tough. “Sounds like you’ve thought about that one for a while,” he said slowly—pensively.   
  
She shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about a lot of things for a while, Josh,” she said with a sad little smile, turning to him before leaning down further, setting her head against her arms.  
  
Without a thought, he mirrored her stance perfectly, his arm immediately waking up with a fresh rush of blood as he repositioned it. “Join the _club_ , soul sister,” he muttered, tone joking, but only outwardly so. “We should have hats made. Buttons, too.”  
  
“And a big ol’ banner.”  
  
“And a big ol’ banner,” he agreed. They stood looking out over the yard in silence, save for the chirping of the evening insects, smelling the night air and avoiding acknowledging the ghosts between them. A quiet chime caught Josh’s attention, and his eyes flicked to the illuminated screen of Sam’s phone; she had just gotten a text, but it seemed she hadn’t noticed. His eyes moved to her face again, following the line of her gaze to the glow of his neighbors’ windows. He looked back to the phone. The screen had gone dark, but he hadn’t cared much about the message in the first place. A different idea had taken root, and before he could put any further consideration into it, he quickly reached over and snatched the phone from the railing, turning it over in his hand.  
  
“Hey—” Sam started before he cut her off.

“Whaddya say? Our game got cut off pretty suddenly, back there…how’s about a quick lightning round. Everyone loves a lightning round.” He flicked his wrist and gave the phone a gentle toss, catching it before she could grab at it.  
  
“I don’t think so, Josh. I’m not sure I’m really in the mood for it.” She held her hand out expectantly, pursing her lips when he continued holding it away from her.  
  
“Uh oh…” he said breezily, tapping at the darkened screen, “Think of all the damage I could do, right? Think of all the alarm clock settings I could fuck with. AM to PM, PM to AM, _forget_ about your snooze settings, because those are _gone_ …”  
  
She sighed a loud, frustrated groan, folding her arms across her chest and turning to lean her back against the railing. “Fine. Lightning round.”  
  
Josh laughed, setting the phone on the railing so that it stood upright, pretending it required much more effort and concentration than it actually did. “Hmm…okay…what to ask, what to ask…” He clucked his tongue as though the idea had only _just_ occurred to him, looking back up at Sam with an expression that was suddenly deadly serious. “What conversations have you been choosing to _not_ have with _me_ , Sam?”  
  
Surprised, she straightened up. She was immediately seized with the terrible feeling that accompanied being called out—the feeling of her gut falling into her feet, her heart leaping into her throat, her head spinning. It was the too-hot-but-too-cold dread of a looming confrontation, or worse yet, confession. “Josh…”  
  
“Now see, that doesn’t really sound like a conversation. At least not to _me_.” He pressed his fingers to his chest dramatically. “C’mon Sammy. You said it yourself, you’ve been thinking about a lot of things for a while, now. So. Let’s go ahead and air at least one of those things out, huh?”  
  
It was _her_ turn to watch _him_ carefully.  
  
Josh picked her phone up again, flipping it over to carefully examine its case. “ _Or_ you could forfeit,” he offered, moving his eyebrows up and down jokingly.  
  
“I’m worried about you.” She didn’t say it quietly, didn’t say it loudly, but instead spoke with a metered kind of evenness that felt somehow worse than both. Sam kept her eyes on her shoes as she spoke, her lips pressing so tightly together between words that they all but disappeared. “I am really, really, _really_ worried about you, Josh.”  
  
He stopped toying with the phone, rocking back as though she’d snapped at him. With wide, shocked eyes, he noticed Sam was pointedly avoiding looking up at him. The feeling of his stomach twisting intensified.  
  
“I know this has been hard for you. I know ‘hard’ isn’t even _close_ to being the right word. I can’t imagine everything you’ve been going through since the girls…” the word caught in her throat like a horrible, infectious wad of phlegm. She cleared her throat to try and dislodge it. “Since they _disappeared_. But I know what some of it’s like.” Then she _did_ raise her eyes, _did_ meet his gaze. “Josh, _no one_ knows what it’s like better than me. No one. I’m sure it’s not even in the same _zip code_ as how you feel or what you’ve gone through, but it’s _something_.” If her heart beat any harder, she thought she might vomit it out. It was pounding so furiously that it felt as though she might split open at any moment, slit right down her middle like some terrible chrysalis. “Losing Hannah and Beth…” she shook her head, blinking away tears she hadn’t realized had been collecting at the corners of her eyes, “It’s _changed_ things. It’s changed _me_. And I see it changing _you_ , too, but Josh…”  
  
He looked away, overwhelmed with a sudden inexplicable guilt. She hadn’t even really _said_ it yet, and already he felt his face growing hot with the shame of being found out. Being _accused_.  
  
Sam shook her head again, eyes bright with tears. “I feel like you’re turning into someone I don’t even _recognize_ anymore. You’re so… _angry_. All the time, you’re just _angry_. Even when you’re trying to have a good time, I can tell you’re _furious_ deep down, and it’s like…” She wet her lower lip before pulling it between her teeth. “It’s like you can’t _stop_. You can’t stop being angry. Even when we’re all just chilling out and having a good time, it’s like this… _cloud_ around you.”  
  
“Anger is productive, Sammy. It gets shit done.” His voice was stilted and jagged, each word sounding as though it didn’t belong with the last. That wouldn’t do, that wasn’t how he had wanted it to come out. His throat was too tight to shape his voice into anything else. He was unspeakably thankful for the darkness around them, if only so Sam couldn’t _see_ the emotion she was hearing from him. “Honestly, I don’t understand how _you_ _aren’t_ pissed.”

“Anger _hurts_ people too, Josh. It hurts other people. It hurts _you_.” Atop the railing, her fingers knotted and unknotted. “And it doesn’t bring them back. I’m too _tired_ to be angry, Josh—I’m too _sad_. But tired? You can recover from that. Sad? It comes and goes. And it _sucks_ when you’re deep in either of them, but they don’t _eat at you_.” She stopped just long enough to give each of her lower eyelids a brief brush with her thumb, just in case. “I want to know that you’re going to be okay. We _need_ each other to be okay. We _need_ each other to get through this in one piece.”

For someone who was usually so on top of shit, so ready to fire off a witty retort on short notice, Josh found he didn’t know what to say to that.

“And I get it, okay? I do—Chris and Ash messed up back then. Just like everyone else. Just like _us_. Everyone messed up really, really bad. Believe me, all right, I’ve…I was pretty furious with Ash, in the beginning. Ask her. It’s not _all_ the time, but _sometimes_ there’s just this…like I said, this weird _tension_ between you guys, and it’s _killing_ me to watch, because—”

“Sam, that’s not—”

“—we all _need_ each other. Ash was showing me your old photo albums earlier, and like…you three have always been so _tight_ , and I don’t want to be coming into this just to watch you guys all fall apart from each other. Yeah, they messed up, but they’re _sorry_ , and they’re _trying_ —”

He raised his hands to try and stop her, shaking his head again. “That’s not—fuck, Sam, that’s—look, there’s just. A lot more than just that, okay? Shit’s…” he groaned, setting his head against one of the support beams as he rubbed his face. “Shit’s complicated.” Part of him wanted her to let it go. _Most_ of him wanted her to let it go. Things rarely turned out the way Josh wanted, those days, though, so what _actually_ happened was Sam said nothing, and kept watching him, waiting for…what?

He let out another groan, feeling very much as though he was back in Hill’s office. “My two best friends are in love with each other. Y’know how _that_ story ends, Sam? Cuz I do. In five years, maybe six, they’re gonna get engaged. Then, they’re gonna get married. Then, they’re gonna get their own house. A nice one, full of bookshelves and maybe a little breakfast nook because you know how much young people these days _looove_ breakfast nooks. They’re gonna get a cat or two, have a wine rack in the kitchen, and the place is always gonna smell like coffee. Chris is gonna make some sort of stupid software that…I don’t know, makes human accountants obsolete, and Ash is gonna write mystery novels for lonely housewives, and they’re going to have their own quaint little life. Know where that leaves _me?_ I don’t. I sure don’t. And now I can’t even say that I’d have my own… _blood_ -family to scurry back to, because surprise.”

“Josh…”

“Just like…where does that leave me, Sam? When they go off and do their thing, _who_ does that leave _me?_ ”

She turned to him more fully, lips pressed into a hard line. “Me, for one.” The sentiment hung in the air like the fairy lights; Sam felt a surge of something akin to satisfaction when it landed, startling Josh into looking back up at her. “You’d still have _me_.”

_That_ had knocked him off-kilter. Again. Josh was left to blink as he struggled against the bluntness of it. “I didn’t mean…” he began to say, and then stopped, narrowing his eyes curiously. “Would I?”

Sam let her arms fall to her sides with an unimportant sound. “Of _course_ , you shmuck.” A corner of her mouth turned up in a show of sad affection. Suddenly, she felt very unsteady on her feet, almost as if she were in the middle of one of those shitty dreams, just waiting to trip over her own sneakers and jolt awake _just_ before hitting the ground. This was dangerous territory. Her heart fluttered somewhere in her throat and deep in her stomach all at once, reminding her voicelessly that she hadn’t simply _wandered_ into this, but had _strode in_ with purpose and intention. “And for what it’s worth…your timetable’s a little off. You’ve got another solid decade or two before _anything_ happens with Chris and Ash, and that’s being generous. Plus— _plus_ —I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but those two? They’re _kinda_ stuck on you like glue. I don’t think they’d leave you in the dust if their lives _depended_ on it.” She laughed to rid her chest of some of the anxious energy that had been gathering. “I mean…I know I’m still kinda new to the nerd table and all that, but I think I’ve hung out with you guys enough to know that it would take a lot for them to ditch you, Josh. A whole lot. I feel like you could punch those two in the face and _they’d_ still apologize to _you_.”

He didn’t respond at first, still trying to make sense of something in his head. Before too long, the porch went quiet, save for the occasional burbles of laughter or music coming from the party out back. When he finally figured out what he wanted to say, Josh found he had to clear his throat a few times to make his voice work properly. “I’m…I’m working on it, Sammy. I am. The…anger, I mean. I’m…” His hand traced strange shapes in the air, “I’m _trying_. I promise. It’s just been…it’s just been hard. But I’m working on it.” He dropped his hands again, anxiously cracking his knuckles out one by one while he chewed on his words. “I know I haven’t always been… _fair_ …with you guys. But I’m…I’m trying now. _Really_ trying.”

Leaning down against the railing once more, Sam turned her gaze to the street in an attempt to make it easier for him. “I know.” Tentatively at first, she reached over, gently squeezing his arm in acknowledgement.

Josh remained still as a statue for a moment, watching the empty street. Then, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, laying it down in front of Sam. “It’s your turn.”

Caught somewhere between wary and weary, Sam let her arms drop to her sides. “Josh, we don’t have to—”

He shrugged one shoulder, “I got one, now you get one. Them’s the rules.”

She looked at their phones, then back up at Josh, then the phones, then him again. “Okay. Okay, well.” Her eyes scanned his face as she tried to plot out her next move. Not that it mattered in any real way, of course…she’d known from the second he took his phone out what she was going to ask. “Are there any conversations _you’ve_ been avoiding having with _me?_ ”

A beat of silence passed, broken by the chirruping of the crickets hidden in the yard. “Yeah,” Josh said, “Just one.”

Sam had time enough to process two very conflicting thoughts (the first being _Wha—?_ and the second being _Guess we_ have _been avoiding_ this _one_ ) before he was kissing her. Her heart was in her throat and his hands were on her sides, warm on her skin through the thin fabric of her hoodie. She had to tilt her head up to meet him, had to pop onto the balls of her feet to lessen the gap between them, had to, had to, had to. And there it was—months of texts and calls and sidelong glances coalescing into a single moment on the Washington’s porch. Pressed close as they were, she could feel the rapid tic of Josh’s pulse under her fingers, filling her with the unnamable hope that he was half as dizzy as she was, that his fingers were numb with prickling jolts each time her lips brushed against his. She wanted…

Her eyes had fluttered closed when he’d first bent down to her, but she blinked as they pulled apart, her chest tight with the gravity of… _everything_.

For a second or two, Josh kept his forehead to hers, a sliver of his tongue poking out to wet his lower lip before he bit back a quiet chuckle. He opened his mouth to say something, caught sight of her expression, and straightened up. “Well that’s…not the face I was hoping for.” If Sam didn’t know him as well as she did, she might’ve missed the doubt in his voice—the _concern_. “Was that, uh, did I just misread—”

“No,” she said quickly. “No, I—”

“I kind of thought that, like—”

She laid a hand flat against his chest, shaking her head. “I…sorry, crap. You didn’t…that was very, _very_ nice.”

He took a deep breath in and sighed it out. “Aw man. Shit, Sammy…my bad. I’ve been around the block once or twice—I know a soft ‘no,’ when I hear one. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s not a no,” Sam said hurriedly (maybe almost _frantically_ ). “It’s not. It’s definitely _not_ a no. It’s a…not…now.” She winced, baring her teeth in a cringe. “That…hang on, that wasn’t—I meant ‘not yet.’” That felt better. Sam found herself able to meet Josh’s eyes again. “Not _yet_ ,” she repeated, as if gauging the words’ weights on her tongue. “Everything’s so… _messy_ right now, and I don’t…” Once, she’d done pretty well on the speech and debate team. Now? Now she was having trouble remembering how to talk _at all._

He was still so close to her, and a quiet, petulant voice in the back of her head wanted nothing more than to stop stuttering, stop making excuses, and kiss him again. But that wasn’t what she _needed._ It wasn’t what _Josh_ needed, either, she thought.

“I’m gonna level with you. I really like you, Josh. I really, really…” she tried to ignore the wolfish quality his grin had taken on, at that, “… _really_ like you. And I…I want _this_ ,” she gestured between the two of them. “ _But_ I don’t want wires to get crossed or feelings to get all jumbled up because…because we’re both _obviously_ still pretty…not okay.”

It was a good point. A fair point. _He_ certainly couldn’t find any way to disagree with it. “You have… _got_ to stop being right all the time, Sammy. It’s really, really, _really_ annoying.”

She smiled uncertainly, acutely aware that neither of them had made any move to pull farther away. “Is that…okay?”

“What? You being right all the time? I _definitely_ just told you to quit it, so, no.” He tried to laugh, but couldn’t manage more than a low snicker, not wanting to shatter the moment entirely with a noise so loud or artificial. “The um, the other thing’s okay, yeah.” He nodded as he met her eyes, his throat tight with relief and want and yeah, maybe a shred of letdown. “God knows I’m sort of the _king_ of, uh, ‘complicated emotions.’” He formed jerky air-quotes in the air and immediately regretted it, not sure where to put his hands when he was done. “But don’t think I’m gonna let you forget.”

“Yeah, no danger there.” She swallowed once, twice, trying to clear her throat or slow the beating of her heart. _Anything_. After what felt like a century, she found her words again. “Stuff’s gonna turn out okay, we’re gonna be okay, and then…we’ll figure all of this out.”

“We will.” Still not sure whether or not it was the right thing to do, he turned back to the street, staring out at the cars parked in front of the house, and draped an arm around Sam’s shoulders. She didn’t move away. Instead, she bent over the railing again, in much the same way they’d stood before, joining him in watching the lazy comings-and-goings of the neighborhood.

One of their phones flashed with a notification. Neither noticed.

Sam couldn’t help the doofy smile bubbling its way to the surface as she turned, pointing out something that she’d been mulling over for some time. “Also, not for nothing, but…the whole ‘best friend’s older brother’ thing? It’s kind of the oldest cliché in the book.”

“Sammy. Everybody _loves_ a good cliché. We eat that shit up like _popcorn_.”

“I guess we do, huh?” She exhaled and felt the collective weight of the past four months lift from her chest as she leaned herself into Josh. “I guess we do.”

***

**Sunday, June 15, 2014  
12:23pm**

“Man, didn’t think people would stay _that_ long.”

“Aw, past your beddy-bye time, Cochise?”

“Look, I don’t know about you, but in _my_ day, parties had _solid_ start and end times, none of this ‘From eleven-to-question-mark’ bullshit. Question mark isn’t a _time_ , it’s a horrible, unknowable pact you make with your guests. It’s a trust-bond, and all of our friends are untrustworthy _assholes_."

“Could you maybe wait until maybe your _mid_ -twenties before you start whining like an old fart?”

“Good luck with that!” Ashley stood up, waving for him to open the trash bag so she could throw away a small stack of cups she’d collected. “Here, can you—”

“Hey!” Josh pulled away from her, abruptly slapping the cups out of her hand, sending them flying past Sam. “Who the _fuck_ raised you, Ash? You’re not picking up the trash at your own surprise party, that’s completely and totally against the rules.”

“He’s right,” Chris piped in, spreading his arms wide as though saying ‘What can you do.’ “It’s a definite party-foul.”

She rolled her eyes and set her hands on her hips, too tired to pretend she wasn’t amused. “Oh come _on_. I’m gonna help.”

“You’re not.”

“I am so. Just let me—”

“Nope!” And with that, Josh gave her one well-placed shove to the shoulder, knocking her back into the pool. When she resurfaced, shaking her hair out of her face and laughing, he shrugged. “Whoops, look what happened. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll _stay_ in there until we’re done.”

Sam blew a kiss down at her, wadding up an upsetting number of napkins and trashing them. “There’s not that much anyway. Ten minutes, tops.”

Ashley sighed dramatically, raking her hands through her hair to push it back. “Oh what _ever_.” By the time she’d pulled herself out of the pool and managed to mostly dry off, they _had_ finished, dropping the last of the trash bags down next to the house. The unpleasant squeal of the sliding door cut through the night’s silence, making her jump and shudder. She watched as Chris and Josh started dragging the bags into the house, finding herself struck with an irresistibly pointless need. “Hang on, _hang on!!_ ” Laughter starting up again, she rummaged through the pile of her stuff on the lounge chair, pulling her phone out of the sweatshirt it’d been wrapped in. “C’mere! Everyone scooch in. I want a picture.”

Chris groaned aloud, “Oh come _on_ , didn’t we get enough of those earlier?”

She wouldn’t be dissuaded, though, pushing herself up against Sam, tugging Josh over as well, trying to manage her phone at the same time. “I _know_ , but it’s…I don’t know, it’s not the same. I want _this_ picture.”

“You heard the lady, Cochise. Bring it in, ya big galoot.” Josh had managed to get his arm around both of the girls, mashed together as they were, and he gestured Chris over with a waggle of his fingers.

“All right,” he said, pretending to sigh as though he hated the idea. “But when it comes out looking like shit, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Ashley fiddled with her phone for another few seconds, attempting to get all four of them successfully in frame. Finally, blessedly, Josh grabbed the phone from out of her hands. “Not sure how you thought your stubby little arms were gonna help there, Ash.”

“ _Stubby?!_ ”

“Everyone say ‘Cheese!’”

“Oh come _on_ —”

The phone’s camera clicked and all four yelled out in unison as the flash nearly blinded them. When Josh pulled his arm back in, the photo was, as expected, fairly horrible. They were all some horrific combination of sopping wet, sunburnt, and washed out by the too-bright flash of the camera…and that was saying _nothing_ of the _terrible_ expressions they had been half-caught in when said flash went off.

Sam was the first to react. “Oh…oh that is…terrible. That’s just. Bad.”

“Ugh. _Extremely_ bad,” Ashley agreed.

“I have never in my _life_ looked worse than I do in that,” Chris said, face contorted in agony.

Even Josh had to shake his head, “I’ve seen mugshots of crackheads that look better than this.”

And then, just as quickly, Chris spoke up again. “You gotta send that to me _right now_ , Ash.”

“Def def def, I need that like ten minutes ago.”

“…Yeah, okay, me too.”

They laughed as they dragged the last of the trash bags back into the house and turned off all the exterior lights, stepping into the bracing cold of the Washingtons’ air-conditioning. Dibs were called on the showers so they could rinse the chlorine out of their hair and the sweat off their skin, and it wasn’t too long after that they passed out completely in the living room, their sun-sore muscles simply too tired to manage the trek upstairs to the bedrooms.

Around them, forming something of a protective halo, four phones lay scattered, plugged into outlets and charging. Each boasted a new photo as the lock screen. A horrible photo. The same photo.

They slept well into the afternoon.


	8. Where (all of them are holding back)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Relevant tags for this chapter: Discussion of mental illness, considerable discussion of death and grief/grieving, that specific brand of tension tied to friendship-breakups, mentions of vomit, probably too many em-dashes and ellipses, but come on, what is this, 7th grade English class???

**Thursday, June 19, 2014**  
**2:02pm**

Hill didn’t usually run late.

Eh…okay, but it was more than that. It was more like, he _never_ ran late—not _once_ in all the time Josh had been seeing him, at least, and that included a handful of… _unexpected_ off-hours appointments. You could set a watch by Dr. Alan J. Hill, so the fact that he hadn’t had Josh ushered into the office yet was peculiar indeed.

Not that he particularly _minded_. Sometimes—not often, but on occasion—Josh liked to try and imagine what the rest of Hill’s clientele was like. He hadn’t been able to tease out whether Hill had a specialty, per se, no matter how he tried (as it turned out, psychologists, by virtue of being people readers, knew very well how to prevent _others_ from reading _them_ ). Were they all like _him?_ Was this a major depressive organization? Was Hill the guy that got called whenever a new and exciting potential roof-jumper turned up? Maybe he was the babysitter brought in for the problem children—the ones who just kept resisting and insisting they were fine, despite all evidence to the contrary. Or maybe, just maybe…he was in-network, under Bob’s insurance plan. One of those was more likely than the others.

Still, sitting around the waiting room was an excellent exercise in both people watching and trying to get to the bottom of those lingering questions. He normally only had time enough to check in at the front desk, smile tightly at the few downturned faces in the seats around him, and then Hill would appear like some jowly gargoyle, giving him the same middle-ring-pinky finger wave he always did, drawing him back into the office. Today, he could stop and smell the roses, so to speak. He kept his phone up to shield the brunt of his stare, every so often flicking at the screen or scrolling through old emails to appear as though he was actually _doing_ something.

The waiting room had three rows of seats: one lining the far wall, and two in the middle of the floor, pressed back-to-back. He always gravitated to the middle row for whatever reason, the one that faced the wall-sitters head-on. In Josh’s mind, the wall-sitters were the same as the couch-people—they were the ones who _needed_ this, needed to pencil in some time each week to cry in front of an understanding face. The wall-sitters never had to run the risk of someone creeping over their shoulders, peeking and prying or maybe even reaching. It was an animalistic sort of instinct, he thought, wanting to sit with a wall to your back. No chance of being taken unawares, always able to see an approaching threat…

Yeah, he knew the wall-sitters. Chris and Ashley were wall-sitters. Wall-sitters and couch people. Then again, as he dwelled on it, that wasn’t _completely_ right. Ashley was a special case, really—the wall wouldn’t be enough for her. No, she would’ve made a beeline for the corner seat. Two walls for the price of one! What a deal!

The wall-sitters today were a father-son pair he’d grown used to noticing after check-in. Must’ve had a similar appointment time. Not with Hill, though…Josh couldn’t imagine Hill counseling children, not with his spooky carvings and hellish triptych and Lecter-esque lectures. The father had his eyes wrought on some article in a business trading magazine, zooming back and forth as he read with a voracious impatience. The son was staring up into the fluorescents above, sneaking the occasional glance his dad’s way. After a while, he tried to mimic his father’s pose, crossing a leg, dropping his hands to his lap. It was almost funny, and almost kind of cute to see such a little boy trying to copy his dad; it was _almost_ funny and _almost_ cute, up until it suddenly felt just a tad _too_ familiar. Josh tried not to frown. The kid caught his eye and he offered him his best, most innocuous stranger smile before looking around the room again.

There was no one sitting in the stronghold of the corner chair (the one he had just then decided to think of as the Ashley Chair), but a man lingered nearby, reading one of the informational postings pinned to the board hanging on the wall. Josh knitted his brow slightly as he began puzzling out _which_ of the pieces he was likely skimming.

Hmm…wearing a suit. Not a _good_ one, definitely not an Armani number, that was for sure, but well tailored and very artfully fitted. Nice leather shoes, too. Shined. Probably not any of the shit about Reiki or crystal healing or Himalayan sea salt therapy, huh? Probably not.

The guy shifted his weight onto his other leg, reaching back to scratch absently at the nape of his neck, and _aha!_ The dent. That telltale little strip of white across his finger. Divorce counseling. He’d stake his life on it.

The door opened, and for a second, he was sure Hill was _finally_ ready. But it had been the entrance door, not the secretive, quiet door that led to the catacomb of offices deeper in the building. There wasn’t an artful way for him to get a good look at the newcomer without literally twisting around in his chair, so he settled for the next best thing. Josh managed to angle his phone to get a decent reflection of the rest of the waiting room on his screen. Hard to make out, sure, but a better move than turning around, waving, and saying ‘Oh hello, don’t mind me—just trying to figure out what brought you here. Me? Oh, you know, the usual.’

He heard the soft _whoosh_ of the reception door opening and closing…a beat…the _whoosh_ of it opening again.

As luck would have it, the newcomer wasn’t alone. He spotted the two of them right as they sat down in the first row, the line of seats facing _away_ from him. The girls sat a few chairs down from him, but he could clearly see the backs of their heads and shoulders as they leaned into each other, could hear their muffled voices as they whispered to one another. He couldn’t see their faces, but even so, he was struck with the impression he’d never seen them there before. In the Rolodex of his mind, he attempted to give them eyes, noses, mouths…none of which seemed to fit the dour faces he’d spotted in the periphery of that room over the past months.

That didn’t mean that they were _unfamiliar_ to him. Wasn’t _that_ a bitch and a half? He couldn’t place them, but he had the weirdest inkling that he still knew them, somehow, or had seem them before, somewhere leagues away from Hill and his associates. As though reading his mind, one of them turned, making her profile visible in the screen’s reflection.

And Josh felt his heart drop. He _knew_ that face. He knew—

“Josh?”

His phone clattered to the floor when he jumped, turning with wide, owlish eyes to see Hill standing in the doorway, hand half-lifted, clearly caught in the pivotal moment before his typical wave. He didn’t react to Josh’s surprise, instead just keeping the door propped open with his other hand while he waited for him to gather his things up.

Trying desperately hard to be inconspicuous, Josh knelt down and scooped up his phone, straightening up to steal a glance at the girls sitting behind him. They were doing _their_ best to keep from being noticed as well, but even so, he was able to see enough of them to know he’d been wrong. He _didn’t_ know them.

He didn’t know them at all.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting,” Hill said once they’d reached his office and the door swung shut behind them. “Very unprofessional of me, I know.”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to find it in my heart to forgive you eventually.” Josh sat down in his usual chair, watching Hill slide a manila folder into one of the cabinets behind his desk. “Is, uh, is everything _okay_ , Alan?”

An amused smile quirked at Hill’s mouth as he turned around. “Ah, but I do think that’s supposed to be my line, isn’t it?”

Josh shrugged, crossing his arms over his chest. “I figure a nugget of reciprocity never hurt anyone.”

“No…no, I suppose not.” With his chore done, Hill sat himself down, folding his hands atop the desk. “Everything is fine on my end, Josh, thank you for asking. Now, how about _you?_ How is everything going on _your_ end?”

Another half-hearted shrug. “Fine, fine. More of the same.”

Hill nodded in that calculating way of his, the corners of his eyes narrowed, his crow’s feet seeming impossibly deep. Josh knew that look—it was, he figured, exactly the same one he’d been giving his waiting room fellows. “So _nothing_ new since our last session, then? You’ve been collecting cobwebs in your bedroom for all that time, and nothing else?”

“If _that’s_ what the kids are calling it, these days,” he muttered. Hill didn’t laugh. Hill _rarely_ laughed at his jokes. Josh always felt like it was some sort of karmic retribution for ripping on Chris’s dad-humor as much as he did. Blowing out a stream of breath, he uncrossed his arms and held out his hands. “Okay, all right, no. I’ve done some stuff.”

“Ah, well, ‘stuff’ is good. ‘Stuff’ is often what separates us from the animals.” He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the desk. “What kind of ‘stuff’ have you been up to, then?”

“We threw a grad party for Ash, actually.”

There was a twinkle in Hill’s eye at that, but Josh appreciated that his hands didn’t immediately go for the fountain pen and legal pad. “A party! Well, I’m sure that was a grand time, all around.”

He thought on it for a second, drumming his fingers against the shape of his phone in his pocket. “It, uh…it actually…really _was_.” It felt like an admission, in a way; after all the time spent ruminating and brooding in the office, it simply felt bizarre to talk about having a good time. Being happy.

Whatever the sentiment was, Hill wasn’t oblivious to it. He’d lifted his hands to his face, index fingers pressed thoughtfully against his chin.

He hadn’t prompted him, but fuck it, Josh knew the drill. “Yeah, it just…it was a really good time. Hit the pool, had a barbecue, made…” a brief pause, and he rubbed his jaw as he laughed, “…made Shirley Temples. Y’know, all the benchmarks of a real rager. It was good. It felt like…like old times, I guess. Like normal.”

Hill opened his hands in a gesture that so clearly read ‘There you go!’ “Well, that’s fantastic! See, that hardly seems like simple ‘stuff’ to me.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess, eh? The strong and silent type, as always, it appears.”

Josh leveled his gaze. “Fine! Okay, it was good. I already said that! It was a good time, we all had fun, and there was…” he seesawed his hand, “Ehhh, what I would call _minimal_ discomfort. What else do you want from me, Alan? You want me to go into how it reminded me of my childhood?”

“A moment of unguarded emotional honesty would be nice, now that you’re asking.”

He pulled a face, rolling his eyes up to the ceiling. “Eugh.”

“A man can dream. But I’m being honest when I say that I’m very relieved the three of you were able to have a enjoyable time together and—”

“Four.”

Hill appeared perplexed for a moment, before realization dawned. “Ah, four, yes, my mistake. Sam as well. Forgive me—I had trouble keeping up with my _own_ social life when I was your age, believe it or not.”

Maybe Hill didn’t laugh at _his_ jokes, but God Almighty, it was hard not to laugh at _that_. Josh was half-convinced Hill had _never_ been his age. Fuck, had his friends called him _Al?_ An upsetting thought.

Gesturing again, the glint of Hill’s pinky ring sent a sparkly of gold light bouncing off the wall opposite. “So you all had a good time at the party, you and Ashley and Chris and Sam—”

_Something_ must’ve shown on his face. What it was, Josh couldn’t say, but suddenly Hill sat back, head cocking to the side ever so minutely.

Oh.

Oh, nevermind, Josh knew what _that_ was.

“Nope,” he said, chopping his hand through the air. “Not happening.”

“It just seems to me that perhaps—”

“No.”

“—there’s something there that you might want to discuss.”

“Nope. Nothing.”

Hill fixed him with a tired, humoring look. “I’m an old man, Josh, not a blind one. I should hope you know you can discuss _any_ matters with me, be they matters of the mind, or…” A smirk, “Matters of the _heart_ , perhaps. Often the two are very closely intertwined.”

Josh made a low groaning noise in the back of his throat, slinking down deep into the chair.

“All right, all right, forget I asked. We’ll mark that for another day.”

“My joy is indescribable.”

“Well, since I _did_ hold you up today, I suppose it’s only sporting of me to ask whether there’s anything pressing that you _would_ like to discuss? Before I launch into a few ideas of my own, that is.”

Never much a fan of Hill’s ‘ideas,’ he leapt at the opening. “I’ve actually been, uh, taking your advice, now that you mention it.” That seemed to pique his interest. “I’ve been trying to, you know, see everything in a different way. Trying to work through some shit in fiction.” He popped his lips a couple times as he thought about how to go about phrasing it. “I’m writing a—well, okay, no, I’m _trying_ to write—a screenplay.”

“Trying is better than not trying,” Hill said helpfully. God, he hoped Bob knew _this_ was what all his money was going towards.

He hummed disbelievingly. “It’s harder than I thought. The way my old man cranks ‘em out, I guess I just figured it’d be a breeze.”

And there it was.

The notepad.

Oh, and there—the fountain pen.

Great. Honestly, it was shocking he’d lasted as long as he had.

“I probably started this stupid thing twenty or thirty times before I got anything to stick. It was like…I don’t know. My head was all…” he waved his hands around either side of his head, crossing his eyes and making a noise reminiscent of tv static. “Scattered and foggy? Shit like that. But I uh…” Josh paused again, half clearing his throat, half chuckling. He’d caught himself just in time, narrowly avoiding saying something he would’ve regretted. “I guess I figured it out. Hit my groove, or something artsy like that. Found my muse, let’s say.”

The scratch of Hill’s pen stopped abruptly.

That wasn’t… _great_.

When Josh looked across the desk, he found Hill watching him very, very carefully. He was still smiling, but it didn’t reach his eyes. Hell, it barely reached his _cheeks_. He seemed to be mulling something over, something Josh could _almost_ read in his eyes. Then it was gone, and his pen began scritching its way across the notepad again. “So. Tell me about this screenplay of yours.” **  
**

*******

**Tuesday, June 24, 2014**  
**12:00pm**

Em  
  
Heyy pretty lady! I feel like its been FOREVER since we talked! Whatre you up to? We should do lunch n catch up <3  


Sam was having a little difficulty figuring out how she was feeling. Well, okay, maybe more than just a _little_ difficulty—it was probably more like a heaping helping of difficulty. A _metric fuckton_ of difficulty. Was that why she was taking so long to reply? Because she didn’t know what the whirling in her head was?

There was an easy way to handle it. She took a deep breath in through her nose, released it slowly through her mouth, rolled her shoulders, and began dissecting.

The facts of the situation were clear enough:

First up, she hadn’t been expecting to hear from Emily. Not today, not next week, not…shit. Belatedly, she realized she had sort of thought maybe she’d _never_ hear from Emily again. Outside of some Facebook comments and a couple of Insta likes, the last time she’d had _any_ sort of contact with her was…lunch after the memorial service. And that had been months ago. An eon ago. A _lifetime_ ago.

So, okay, surprise. Surprise was emotion number one. Easy peasy one-two-threesy. Onto the next.

Secondly, she _had_ been expecting a text from someone else. A few someones, actually—she was waiting to hear back from her dad about their dinner plans, waiting for the ‘seriously fucking hilarious’ story Chris had been typing up in the group text for the better part of fifteen minutes (horrifying in and of itself), waiting for a non-group-text-related reply from Josh…

Oh, definitely disappointment. That was number two. See, this was totally simple!

And then thirdly, it…well…crap.

Okay.

This one was going to suck. Because…yeah, all right, she knew emotion number three already. She didn’t want to think about three, but three wasn’t going anywhere.

Once, she had counted Emily as one of her best friends; not that long ago, in all truth. Then, Blackwood had happened. All of Blackwood. Not _just_ the grand finale, not _just_ the twins going missing, not _just_ the prank, but _all_ of it. The more she thought back on that weekend (and _fuck_ , she had been trying so hard _not_ to do that, lately), Emily and Jessica had been on Hannah since the second she and Sam found their way down into the cinema room. It had been an all-out assault of the petty middle school kind. Sure, it had been the sort of bullshit she would’ve been able to shrug off and put behind her if Hannah was still there, still… _around_ , but she wasn’t, so Sam couldn’t.

Plus…and this was where she really had to buckle in, because things got even stickier…

Whoever she had been before, _what_ ever she had been before, when her group was the twins and Mike and Emily and even sometimes Jessica and Matt, that was over now. That person was tucked away somewhere up in her dad’s attic along with the awful red-and-white sweater she’d worn that night, neatly folded and marked for charity donation. Nowadays she was just another dork, one of society’s mismatched dryer socks, the world’s worst Social Suicide player. She was Samantha Giddings, she of the mysterious middle name, lover of vegan milkshakes, confidante and counselor and co-conspirator.

She was an Almost, and it was no secret that the Almosts had a less than warm opinion of Emily Davis. Whether it was some deep-rooted personal offense or just the simple us-versus-them mentality of high school clinging tight, she still wasn’t completely certain. But it was there. It was there, and unbeknownst to her, that feeling had seeped into her bones as well, becoming as firmly rooted as parasitic ivy.

What did that mean? Plain and simple, it meant emotion three was dread. Deep, lingering dread. Because whether Emily knew it or not (and there was very little that Emily _didn’t_ know), Sam wasn’t counting her as one of her friends anymore. Not really. Not quite. Not that they were enemies! It didn’t go that far, and she didn’t think it ever _would,_ but…but still. They sat at different metaphorical lunch tables now, and neither Hannah nor Beth was there to bridge that gap.

Her phone blipped again, the preview of Chris’s ungodly long message sliding down the screen (she only briefly glimpsed it, but saw the words ‘explosive,’ ‘greasy,’ and ‘grapefruit,’ and already knew that it was going to be a doozy). She flicked it away, swallowing hard as she took another steadying breath. This shouldn’t have been so hard, it shouldn’t have been so _scary_ …so _why_ was her body reacting like she and Emily were in the middle of some catastrophically massive blowout of a fight?

Sam’s fingers hovered over her phone’s keyboard. The disconnect was so weird— _too_ weird—and she had to do _something_ about it.

Em  
  
Oh hey em :) yeah omg its been forever!  
Just trying to catch up on my zs before classes start up again you know how it goes  


Emily’s reply was, of course, immediate.

Em  
  
Oh hey em :) yeah omg its been forever!  
Just trying to catch up on my zs before classes start up again you know how it goes  
Ohhh trust me  
I know that one ;)  


All at once, she realized she was frowning. Grimacing, more like, waiting for an impact that she _knew_ wouldn’t come. What was _wrong_ with her?

Em  
  
Haha but yeah we definitely should catch up sometime  
Its been too long  
Does sat work for you??  
Im gonna be right in ur neck of the woods!  


And then, as though witnessing the actions of someone else, Sam watched herself pull The Move.

Em  
  
Aw man I cant :(  
I already have a thing with my dad he wants to do one of his hiking trips this weekend Im sorry  


That time, Emily’s response was _not_ immediate. Sam knew her well enough to imagine her expression as she looked down at the message.

Em  
  
Aw man I cant :(  
I already have a thing with my dad he wants to do one of his hiking trips this weekend Im sorry  
Oh well that sucks  
Another time then  
Yeah definitely!  


She watched her screen for another minute or two just to be sure that Emily wouldn’t start typing again. When she didn’t, Sam closed the thread, navigated to her inbox, and deleted the conversation entirely. She wasn’t sure why she did it, wasn’t sure what drove _that_ particular impulse, but it was over and done with before she could pour any thought into it. She didn’t _fully_ comprehend how wound up she really was until her phone lit up again, and she nearly jumped out of her bed in surprise.

Daddio  
  
How would you feel about garlic bread?  


Her breath escaped her in a long, shaky stream. At least that was a conversation she felt equipped to handle.

Daddio  
  
How would you feel about garlic bread?  
Im generally a fan :)  


 ***

**Wednesday, June 25, 2014**  
**4:45pm**

That should’ve been the end of it. She had shrugged off the invite, had managed to be cordial enough in her messages, had let herself think that maybe she could still handle being friends from a distance.

But it wasn’t over.

Of _course_ it wasn’t over.

Again, it had just been a matter of taking everything apart, piece-by-piece, plotting it all out into a neat little list. She would hang out with Emily _eventually_ , maybe have coffee or get lunch somewhere. They would talk about school. They would leave with a perfunctory hug and the tedious high school friend motto of ‘We definitely should do this more often!’ before going their separate ways. Maybe they’d do that for a year or two. Then they’d just quietly ( _peacefully_ ) drift apart. Two ships at sea.

Sam had felt fairly confident about that plan—it was doable! It saved everyone’s feelings from being hurt more than they already were, _and_ it allowed everyone involved to blame the growing chasm between them on life and school and growing up instead of the incident on the mountain. It could’ve worked. It _should’ve_ worked.

And then she started scrolling through her Facebook feed.

Was there a name for the specific feeling that accompanied seeing something you wished you hadn’t? The stomach-dropping, heart-withering, mouth-drying, skin-clammifying, eye-prickling, bowel-knotting agony that _only_ seemed to come with reading something you would’ve been better off not knowing existed? There probably was. Ashley probably knew it. Probably used it as an answer in Scrabble.

_Sam_ didn’t know it, though; all _Sam_ knew was one moment she was fine, and the next she felt as though someone had punched her in the stomach with brass knuckles.

She recognized the photo first, a crowded selfie from inside the local fro-yo place. A group of girls sat clustered around a cramped table, showing off the contents of their cups while grinning. Sam was one of them. So was Emily. Smack dab in the middle, each with a novelty candle stuck into their swirls (a gaudy 1 and 6 done up in blue and white wax), were the twins. There was Hannah, smiling her nervous little smile. There was Beth, eyes mostly closed as she laughed at a joke someone had just told. There they were.

It took a moment for Sam to realize she hadn’t been breathing. When she inhaled, her chest rattled as if full of marbles.

The original comment of the picture had been ‘Happy SWEET 16!!!!!!’ _She_ had been the one who posted it, and now it seemed someone else had _re_ posted it, dragging it up from the depths of some long-forgotten photo collection and slapping a few filters overtop of it. She’d gotten a glimpse of who it had been already, but even if she hadn’t, Sam thought it was easy enough to tell. Jessica had been cropped out of the original. Jessica had been the _only one_ cropped out of the original.

Distantly, she recalled something Josh had said to her at Ashley’s grad party—something about splitting the group.

**Emily Davis** Omg found this on my phone and I can’t believe this was almost 3 years ago already :( Miss u girls more and more every day. Love u so so so much <3 rip **Beth W** and **Han** <3

Her hands were shaking.

It was hard to tell how long she sat there, staring at the photo. Long enough that her brain was able to process all manner of unpleasant things, certainly: Jessica’s elbow was still visible, the post had one hundred and six likes, the reflection of Sam’s old phone case could be seen in Hannah’s glasses, thirty-seven people had left comments, Beth’s fro-yo had gummy bears sprinkled on top even though she hated how they turned to rock when they got cold, people had shared the post five times. She noticed these things all at once as a horrible _gestalt_ , each individual facet occurring to her in its own time, one popping up after another.

_Fuck her_ , said a tiny voice in the very back recesses of her head.

_Please, please don’t let Josh see this_ , said another. Sam didn’t have the strength of will to hover her cursor over the list of people who’d liked or commented or shared to determine whether or not he was among them.

_Fuck her_ , the first voice repeated, growing louder.

_Why would she do that?_ asked still another voice, smaller and weaker than the others. It _wasn’t_ the girls’ birthday (not yet), and it wasn’t _any_ anniversary of their going missing (not yet), and there was no _reason_ for it, there was no Earthly _reason_ for her to dredge this up and put it on her profile, except maybe for the attention and the chance to make some stupid public statement about what level of esteem she held Jessica in or what she thought of Sam rejecting her lunch invite. But none of that made sense. None of it made any sense.

_Fuck her fuck her fuck her FUCK! HER!_ It built to a roar behind her eyes, making her vision quake until she couldn’t see the screen of her laptop clearly anymore.

It was around that time that Sam realized she was crying. Not just tiny sniffles, either, but a horrible silent weeping, her trembling hands balled into fists on her lap, her face a wet, dripping mess. She was too hot. She was too cold. Her arms were cramping up and her lower back ached. It was hard to swallow. It was hard to _think_. Her head was ringing with unending, breathless crescendos of _FUCK FUCK FUCK_.

With no concern for the computer, she slammed her laptop shut in one jerky motion. She pushed it away from her as though afraid it might lunge and bite at her fingers or face, getting up from her desk and stalking quiet circles around her room. After two such circles, she opened the laptop again, closing out of her internet browser without letting her eyes fall on the screen. When she calmed herself down— _if_ she was able to calm herself down—the _last_ thing she’d want to do was open up to the photo again and throw herself right back into the fire. She shut it again, maybe with slightly less vigor the second time, seamlessly moving back into her pacing.

Her hands knotted in her hair, tangling and tugging as she tried to regain some measure of control. Crying was fine, crying was healthy. This, though? This reeked of a full-blown, frustration-driven meltdown, and that was less healthy. Deep breath in through the nose. Deep breath out through the mouth. Deep breath in through the nose. Deep breath out…

She paced until the worst of the anger spike had dissipated, leaving residual tingles zinging up and down her fingers. Sam undid her hair, shook it out, scooped it back up, and tied it back again, if only to give her hands something to do. Moving was good, busy was good, it helped keep things in perspective, made it easier to think through next steps.

An uncharacteristic flare of pettiness had crept its way up her brainstem, irresistible as a dry-heave. Before she knew it, she was holding her phone, opening her text inbox. Her finger hovered over the Almosts’ thread, bobbing up and down in contemplation. In the end, she decided against it, opening a different conversation entirely. She scrolled and scrolled until she found the one she was looking for, typed out a quick message, then closed it down again and flipped her phone onto her bed.

It wasn’t how she _normally_ did things. Still, it made her feel a little better. Not much, obviously, but _some_. Sam released another long breath, feeling a heavy wave of tension release from her shoulders.

There was no joy in what she decided to do next; that didn’t change the fact that it had to be done. She picked her laptop up, sat down cross-legged on the floor with her back braced against the wall, and opened it up again. Subconsciously, she’d taken to twisting her bracelet around her wrist, the skin of her underarm quickly turning pink and itchy from the friction. There was no reason for any of this to feel as _big_ as it did.

She knew she couldn’t block her, couldn’t unfriend her…that was…too much, somehow. A step too far. By the same token, she knew if she so much as saw Emily’s profile picture, much less any of her posts, she’d lose her shit again. The selfie had served as a terrible reminder that Hannah’s and Beth’s birthday was just around the corner, and she couldn’t _fathom_ having to see _anything_ Emily (or the others) might think to post or share for that occasion. That wasn’t something she was looking forward to. Still, she couldn’t block her. Emily would _know_ if Sam blocked her.

Unfollowing was the wise way to go, she thought. They’d still be friends (if only technically), Sam wouldn’t have to see any of her stuff…it was a win-win. Or at least it wasn’t a lose-lose.

Really, none of this felt very much like winning.

But if she unfollowed Emily, then she had to unfollow _Mike_. And if she unfollowed Mike, then fuck she had to unfollow _Jessica_ , and if she unfollowed Jessica then of course she had to unfollow _Matt_ , and—

She clicked icon after icon, not falling so much as tumbling down the rabbit hole of the old high school chain of command, trying to mute every- and anyone who might even _possibly_ post or share or comment or mention something that would make her think of Emily. Or the girls. Or the past. Or anything.

Sam refreshed the page to check her feed again. No sign of them.

Her thoughts from last night came buzzing in to fill the empty spaces in her head and chest and gut, thickening there like ropy, grasping tentacles. How had things gone this far? How had everything changed so much? The inside of her head became an echo chamber of those questions, pulsing in time with her heart.

The answer was Blackwood Pines. It was _always_ Blackwood Pines. No matter how far away she was, no matter how much time went by, no matter how hot the weather became, it always came down to Blackwood Pines. It never. Went. Away.

Swallowing hard against another hot wave of tears, she reached behind herself to where she thought her phone had landed, rifling around until her fingers brushed it. She turned it over in her hand once, twice, and then checked to see if she had any replies.

***

**5:20pm**

Ashley woke up very suddenly from a sleep she couldn’t remember falling into. She gasped, jarred from some vague, shapeless dream already falling away from her, looking around her room as though expecting to see something looming next to the bed. There _wasn’t_ anything looming (unless she counted Charlie, who lifted his head from where he was curled at her feet, snorted an asthmatic breath, and then promptly flopped back down), there was _never_ anything looming, but the feeling of uncertainty didn’t immediately dissipate.

Blearily, she rubbed at her eyes, trying to break through the hazy fog of sleep. It seemed she’d rolled over at some point, because she could hear the movie still playing behind her. She’d probably seen _Shutter Island_ fifty times, but it was one of the few that held up even _after_ you knew the twist. In her _humblest_ of opinions…it actually got _better_ once you did. Once you knew how it ended, you could see all the tiny things you missed before, spot all the clues. All the miniscule things you never noticed suddenly became giant, blinking neon signs, showing you how obvious the truth was, how clear the narrative, how _simple_ it would’ve been to see the ending coming, if only you’d paid more attention.

Then again, she was something of a nerd in that respect.

Well…okay, she was something of a nerd in many respects, really.

She rejoined the land of the living just as the doctor, Jeremiah Bragg, was poignantly telling Leonardo Dicaprio’s character Teddy that “Wounds can create monsters,” which had always been one of her favorite lines—but no, no, wait.

That wasn’t right.

That wasn’t right at all.

There wasn’t a Jeremiah Bragg in the movie.

_Jeremiah Cragg_ was the whiskey Josh’s dad liked so much; _Jefferson_ _Bragg_ was the doctor. He—no.

Wait.

Hang on.

Her eyes were fully open just then, the dreamy remnants of her dozing suddenly long-gone.

The doctor in the movie was Jeremiah _Nahring_ or _Nayring_ or something like that. Not Cragg, not Bragg. Those were different things, very different.

It seemed that, as it was so wont to do during those fuzzy stretches where she found herself caught between waking and sleep, her mind had traveled back to the lodge. She sat up against her pillows, trying not to shudder with the memory of snow. _Blech_. Not the best way to wake up from a nap. She hadn’t been _dreaming_ about the lodge though, had she? Even as she racked her brain, she didn’t _think_ she had, which meant something _else_ had startled her awake. Huh. What could that have been?

There was a dip in the mattress at the foot of her bed as Charlie got up and waddled her way, plopping right back down next to her. He stared up at her with his buggy eyes, the dark markings of his face making him appear perpetually concerned.

“Whaddya think, buddy?” she yawned, her words thick on her tongue. “Neighbors slamming doors again? Mom drop something in the kitchen?”

Charlie didn’t answer except to return her yawn, his tongue lolling out of his mouth to hang down.

“Some guard dog _you_ are…” Ashley scratched at his ears absently as she glanced around her room again, dropping her head down to smooch his wrinkly face before finally grabbing her phone off the bedside table to check it.

Ah, there it was. The instigating action. The thing that had no doubt woken her up. Two new notifications. She smiled momentarily at the terrible selfie from her grad party that now served as her lock screen until the message notifications caught her eye.

2 People  
  
Sam  
Hey so this is random but  
Are you guys free this weekend?  


She blinked once or twice to clear the sleep from her brain, unlocking her phone. She was half a second away from responding when she found her fingers frozen. Her internal defense system was going _nuts_ , the familiar voice of self-preservation screaming somewhere back in her lizard brain that something was _off_ , something was _wrong_ , she needed to hang the _fuck_ on for a hot second. Since that little voice had never once steered her wrong, she listened. She didn’t tap so much as one key. She read Sam’s message over again, found it inconspicuous, and furrowed her brow. What was the vibe she was getting, then? What was the problem here? There was nothing weird about Sam wanting to hang out with them over the weekend, because they hung out _most_ weekends, and…

It hit her a second later. This wasn’t the group text. It was an entirely separate thread. The top of her screen didn’t have the familiar label of ‘ **THE ALMOSTS** ,’ or the string of messages and contact pictures she was used to. No, instead, the top of this thread read ‘ **2 People**.’ When she tapped it, the two names that showed up were Sam’s and Chris’s. No sign of Josh. She scrolled up uncertainly, spotting a short string of old messages.

2 People  
  
**4/15/14** 6:20 PM  
Hey Sam!  
  
I hope this isn’t too random, but we wanted to stop by and say hi really quick…are you in your dorm?  
  
Oh, related question, which dorm is yours?  
  
**4/15/14** 6:22 PM  
Sam  
Oh hey yeah Im in my dorm come on over  
Its smith hall right off main st  
Hard to miss  
Room 249  


Slowly, she sat up straighter, the cogs of her brain spinning like the teacups at Disney World (coincidentally making her nearly as nauseous).

The combination of no Josh, the reawakening of the ‘we need to talk’ thread, and the inclusion of the phrase ‘Hey so this is random,’ was sending her into the beginnings of an anxiety attack. This had bad news written _all_ over it—top to bottom, bottom to top, side to side, front to back. Her mind did the frantic thing it always did in situations like that: started rolling back the tape to try and pinpoint any offensive or even mildly rude thing she might’ve said about, to, or _around_ Sam. If she was including _Chris_ on this, then it must’ve been something the _two_ of them had done—had there been a problem at her grad party that she’d been oblivious to? Had she mentioned something she shouldn’t have? Had she made some stupid offhanded comment about ‘getting lost’ or had she said something about the twins or…Hell, she was trying to think of mean things she might’ve _thought privately_. Could Sam read minds?! Science hadn’t _proven_ telepathy yet, but it hadn’t _dis_ proven it either, so…

In her hand, her phone buzzed like a furious insect. Instead of Sam’s thread, an older one popped up.

Chris  
  
uh so this is weird right  
the whole new text thing is weird yeah  
im not just reading into it too much am i  
Oh thank GOD!  
I thought I was just being super paranoid!  
!!!!!  
shit ok good  
i mean not GOOD cuz obvs some shits up but  
yk  
Yeah.  
Ugh.  


Relief and dread filled her in equal parts, making her queasy and hot. At least if _Chris_ agreed with her, then she wasn’t out of her mind. That still didn’t bode well for whatever Sam was angling at, however. But there was some modicum of comfort in knowing that she and Chris had taken the exact same course of action in avoiding Sam’s text for the time being. Their private thread felt like a well defended bastion of strategy; they could compare notes, try and figure out what was happening, and at least if shit went south…well, they’d be clinging to the same life raft.

Chris  
  
It’s NOT a new thread, though.  
It’s the one WE made when you told us about Josh going to Burbank.  
…great.  
great  
fantastic  
the let’s talk about serious shit text  
man i deleted that shit like immediately FOR THIS VERY REASON  
duck.  
fuck  
i meant fuck  
ducking autocorrect  
UGH  
…theories??  
On what’s going on? I got nothing.  
I’m just like…trying to think if I said anything mean? :\  
I don’t think I did but…what IF?  
well if you did then i did too  
i mean clearly  
if this is an angry thing then it’s you AND me  
but sam doesn’t really get pissed that often  
I guess not…  
and you and me aren’t exactly uh  
polarizing people  
Eh…  
so uhhhh  
whyyyyyyyy  
do we think josh isn’t in on this  
I have absolutely no idea. At all.  


That was a fib. A big one. A fat one. Ashley actually _did_ have ideas about _that_. She had some thoughts on why someone— _anyone_ —might choose to exclude Josh from a conversation. Especially lately.

But…that didn’t feel right, either. She doubted Sam would be excluding him for the same reasons _she_ might’ve. The chances of that were slim and none.

Chris  
  
aw man cmon ash  
you’re the sherlock of the group  
just put the pieces together  
What pieces?  
…idk but i'm sure there are pieces  
clues for you to find  
and then write down in your notebook like steve  
Wait.  
Steve who?   
blue's clues steve???  
striped sweater steve?????  
the premier clue finder of our time steve???????  
here's the mail it never fails steve???????????  
sorry shit i'm nervous  
i keep trying to figure out if i said anything too  
i really don’t think i did tho  
and honestly i can’t imagine you did either  
Glad one of us is feeling confident about that.  
oh please  
I say stupid things all the time!  
I don’t think about them, and then they just come out of my mouth.  
But like…don’t you think…  
I don’t know.  
Don’t you think Sam’s the kinda person who would TELL us right when we said it?  
IF we said something?  


There she was, in the lodge again. Standing in front of the sink, hands raw from doing dishes. God, she could remember Sam yelling at her, accusing her, challenging her on whether she _really_ thought she wouldn’t have done _exactly_ what Hannah had, if she’d taken her place. Her cheeks heated up at the thought, and she tried to physically shake the image of the memory from her head. She’d _apologized_ for that. Sam had _accepted_ that apology. It wouldn’t have been that.

Chris  
  
def def def  
look it’s…probably nothing  
Nothing, huh?  
That’s why we both wanna barf, right?  
tbf we both wanna barf because we’re socially inept nerds ash  
probably with a whole grab bag of anxiety disorders between us  
scratch that probably  
i meant to say definitely  
fear barfing is the nerd’s only real defense mechanism  
it’s all nature gave us  
ok fuck this i'm just gonna answer  
wait  
ARE you free this weekend?  
full disclosure there’s no way in FUCK i'm saying i am if you’re not  
Pfft.  
Yeah, I should be free.  
I’ll wait a minute or two after you reply so it doesn’t look like we were scheming.  
see  
this is why you’re the smart one  
Oh my God, shut up.  
that's the spirit!  
welp let’s see how THIS turns out  
Yeah. Not like we’ll be…I dunno…  
Panicking about it until we actually meet up.  
but at least we’ll be panicking TOGETHER!!!  
Wow.  
Helpful.  
You should consider a career in therapy.  
i've been told that!!!  
people say i have a soothing bedside manner  
ugh OK TEXTING NOW  
You got this!  
glad to know you got my back on that one  
I always got your back, dummy.  
Well, as long as you’ve got mine, at least.  
It’s a very quid pro quo arrangement.  
i think the very nature of this conversation has proved  
without a doubt  
i got your back  
and again also probably some anxiety disorders  
the two are not mutually exclusive  
i’m pretty sure i can have your back AND have panic attacks at the same time  
i'm very good at multitasking  
UGH ok i sent it  
i know you can see that too  
oh GOD she’s responding already  


She set her phone down again, glad Chris had volunteered to dive into it first. It gave her an excuse to think over what she was going to say. In her head, she rehearsed a couple lines, trying to figure out what would seem the most casual or natural or maybe even slightly apologetic. She tried not to frown as she bent over, hugging Charlie’s wrinkly, squishy body against hers. He seemed to pick up on her nervousness, clambering up onto her lap and curling up, his little cinnamon-bun tail wagging lethargically.

When the idea hit her, it all but knocked her breath out of her lungs. Her fingers were still rubbing Charlie’s ears, but as the thought took shape, she felt her muscles begin to grow stiff and unmoving. Had they been worried about the wrong thing? Could it be that there was _nothing_ Sam was upset about? That the problem wasn’t hers at all?

Was something up with _Josh?_

Slowly, and much to Charlie’s displeasure, her hands fell back to her lap. The frenzy she’d worked herself up into was gone in less than a moment, overtaken by the strangely solid inkling that yes, yes something _was_ wrong with Josh. Roll back the tape, look for those bright and blinking clues missed the first time around, put the pieces together and write them down in a notebook.

There were the obvious things, of course—like the Burbank story. Could she have believed he’d spent all that time in October (and then again in March) with Bob at the movie studio? Sure she could’ve! If she didn’t _know_ how shaky Josh’s relationship with his dad was. Even when Bob was _home_ , it was hard to keep him and Josh in the same room for too long, so the idea of spending the better part of a _month_ together without Melinda or the twins to serve as a buffer? She wasn’t totally buying that. Even so, she _could’ve_ bought it…if Chris and Josh hadn’t both been so _insistent_ on it. Chris especially had made a point to squeeze it into their conversations, the same phrasing over and over again: _He’s with his dad in Burbank_. Like it was some old timey code that was meant to signify something else.

There was also the simple fact that things had been so _weird_ between them since October, since that first supposed trip to Burbank. She was still having trouble nailing down the specifics of that one, but it didn’t just feel like distance. It wasn’t the natural ebb and flow of people drifting apart with time. There must’ve been some catalyst she missed, an argument she couldn’t remember or an unintentional insult that predated the prank at the lodge.

And then…there was that tense conversation she’d only half-heard the night of the twins’ memorial service. _That_ was what was troubling her the most, really, because despite the fact she’d only caught snippets of the boys’ words through the open window (most of which she’d already forgotten), the general impression of it had stuck with her like a terrible nightmare. Chris had asked Josh some question—or he’d _started_ to ask him a question—and Josh had taken _great_ offense to it. But…what had it been? What had made him so _angry?_

Was that why things were so prickly between the two of them now?

She furrowed her brow, wringing every last detail she could from what slivers of the conversation she could remember. The question wasn’t there, though. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember what Chris might’ve asked, or why it might’ve made Josh so _angry_. It didn’t answer any of _her_ questions, that much was sure. It didn’t do _anything_ …except convince her that she was onto something.

Charlie whined, pawing pathetically at her hands until she started rubbing his ears again. “Hmm,” Ashley found herself saying out loud. “Crap. Am I missing something, Charlie?” He just panted and grinned a drooly grin up at her, adding nothing useful to the brainstorming session. “I think I am,” she said after a moment, eyes drawn to her phone as the screen lit up with another flurry of texts from Chris and Sam. “I think maybe I’m missing a _lot_ of somethings.”

With one hand, she picked her phone back up to reply, surprised to find that the whirlwind of panic she’d been dealing with was completely gone. There was no exhaustion left in its wake, and wasn’t _that_ the strangest thing? Instead, she could feel herself buzz with a new sort of anticipation. She was in the dark for the moment, left to tug at strings she couldn’t see the ends of, but maybe…maybe that was okay. Ashley typed out an answer to Sam’s texts, comforted by the knowledge that while she didn’t have all the answers yet, it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

She was, after all, the Sherlock of the group.

***

**Saturday, June 28, 2014**  
**11:17am**

The day was promising to be _sweltering_ ; already the sun was beating down, making the park feel more like the interior of a car idling in the heat. The only saving grace was a slight breeze coming from off of the lake, and even then, if you weren’t in the shade, it wasn’t particularly cooling. It would’ve made a hell of a lot more sense for them to have met somewhere indoors where there was air conditioning, or fans, or fuck, a refrigerator they could leave ajar and take turns standing in front of.

But no, instead they were in the park, maybe a third of the way through the baby-level walking trail, sweating their asses off as they puttered along. Sam couldn’t help but feel _somewhat_ responsible. It had been her call, after all. If she _actually_ went hiking, then it wasn’t like she’d _lied_ to Emily. She’d just sort of changed a couple details around.

Okay, _two_ details, really.

Two details who were already trailing a few feet behind. Two details who, she was quickly being forced to remember, weren’t exactly _athletes_ by nature.

“Sam, please…I fucking… _beg_ of you. I can’t die in the woods. Not like this. Hartleys don’t die in the great outdoors, they die on the couch, in the great _indoors,_ usually covered in some sort of food residue. I can’t and won’t be an exception to that rich family tradition.”

She was fairly certain Chris was playing it up—God, she _hoped_ he was playing it up, because they’d only been walking for maybe twenty minutes—but she figured it had been enough beating around the bush. The conversation was going to have to happen _eventually_. With a half-skip, she turned around, walking backwards as she faced them with an appraising look. “ _Really?_ ” Sam joked, “You’re _dying?_ ”

“ _Yes_.”

Ashley laughed under her breath but kept chugging along, despite how flushed her face was. Why she hadn’t worn shorts or a t-shirt, Sam couldn’t begin to fathom, but even hot as she must’ve been, at least she wasn’t complaining as much as Chris.

Heaving a loud sigh, she pretended to be disappointed. “So much for my dreams of us going mountain climbing together, huh?”

“Oh _God_.”

“There’s a bench up ahead, just past the bend. C’mon, two more minutes.”

“This is it, huh? This is the end.”

Sam clucked her tongue, “You’re such a _baby!_ ”

“You drag us out into the middle of the woods—”

“It’s a park, but okay.”

“Now you have us wander away from all witnesses—”

“We’re on the family walking trail. We just passed a mom with a stroller like…five minutes ago. Honestly, I’m surprised _she_ hasn’t passed _us_ , at this point.”

“All that’s left to do is kill us, loot us, hide our bodies, and keep going. It’s the perfect crime.”

Sam looked at Ashley. “How do you deal with this? _How?_ He realizes the more he whines like that, the more tempting it becomes to actually push him down into the lake, doesn’t he?”

She shrugged in response, her hands hidden in the pouch of her hooded sweatshirt. “Between you and me, I’m considering shoving him, myself.”

Again, a pang of guilt started to poke at the base of Sam’s stomach. Yeah, sure, _most_ of Ashley’s reticence was _probably_ due to the heat, but there was no doubt in her mind that another good chunk was the same dread _she_ was feeling. When she faced forward again, the rest station coming into view. “Bench,” she said simply, waving an arm with the grand, sweeping motion of a game show hostess brandishing a prize.

“ _Bench_ ,” Chris repeated, jokingly staggering up to it before collapsing with a hand thrown daintily over his forehead. The image was something akin to a Victorian lady sprawled across a fainting couch after being overcome by a case of the vapors. It seemed to be what he was going for, because when he spoke up again, it was in a horrendously tremulous travesty of a British accent. “This is what you do for _fun?_ How perfectly _barbaric!_ ” He yelped a second later, recoiling when Sam plunked one of her sneakers up on the edge of the bench near his head.

“How did you survive gym?” Sam pulled a face down at him, using the rest as an excuse to get a few quad stretches in.

“Lots of sick notes. Did you ever hear the story of how I barfed during the Presidential Fitness Test? I was like. Halfway through the mile run. And then just. Blurgh. Spent the rest of the period in the nurse’s office. The perfect crime.”

“You made yourself puke to get out of running the mile?”

“Whoa whoa whoa…who said anything about _making_ myself yartz? Nah, son, that shit was organic, natural, free-range vomit.”

“The nerd’s natural defense mechanism.” As Ashley said it, she and Chris exchanged a look that Sam couldn’t quite parse, as though they were recalling some old joke she wasn’t in on. Perching herself on the top of the bench, balancing herself precariously, Ashley let her legs swing. “So, um…” She kept her eyes trained on the ground, where her high-tops were dragging lines through the dusty dirt of the trail. For a second or two, she didn’t say anything else, letting the ambient sounds of the park fill the space. She’d been _hoping_ that maybe one of them would bring it up first, the uncomfortable reason they’d (almost) all been gathered there.

Unfortunately, it seemed they were _all_ hoping someone else would bring it up first. Neither Sam nor Chris said anything. They each just…found something in middle space to focus their eyes on, avoiding eye contact.

Ashley had the distinct feeling that this was what it would’ve been like to be a teacher. Open your mouth, ask a question, and suddenly everyone looks away and forgets they speak English. She sighed to herself, tightening her grip on the bench. “It kinda seemed like you wanted to talk to us about something?” It had been meant to come out as a statement of fact, but her traitorous voice had hooked upwards sharply at the end, anxiety turning it into a question. There was no hiding her wince as she heard it come out of her own mouth. “I mean,” and she was _off_ , ladies and gents, trying to cover her tracks and backpedal as best she could. “Not that like…just the _three_ of us can’t hang out or anything, that’s not what I meant, it just sort of…I mean, it _seemed_ like you wanted to talk? But maybe you didn’t, I don’t know. Did you? Or…?”

Sam’s mouth pulled itself into an odd shape. Not really a smile, not really a grimace, something in the middle. It probably wasn’t half as reassuring as she wanted it to be. She faced the lake more fully, folding herself over in her stretch. “I, uh…yeah, yeah I did wanna talk about…something.” She sighed, wondering when exactly she’d become the sort of person who sighed so _often_. That wasn’t her usual shtick. Of course, she knew the answer, she _always_ knew the answer, especially since it hadn’t changed from the initial shock of seeing Emily’s Facebook post. “The twins’ birthday’s coming up.” Sam thought she did a good job delivering the news, thought she’d kept her voice even and unaffected, but even with them in her periphery, she could see Ashley and Chris trade a surprised look.

“…oh.” Chris’s voice was quieter than it had been all day. He eased himself up until he was sitting properly, aiming his gaze over the lake as well. “I guess we didn’t…realize.” It wasn’t the right thing to say, apparently—Sam had seemed on the verge of saying something else, but she stopped, posture changing. “I knew their birthday was in summer, I guess I never really knew… _when_ in summer.”

Sam looked at them sitting back-to-back on the bench, Chris facing the lake, Ashley still looking down at her shoes, and felt herself buffeted by a peculiar chain of thought: It made _sense_ they wouldn’t know the girls’ birthday off the top of their heads, given that they weren’t _close_ to them; Sam should’ve known that much, but…

“Man,” Chris was still going on, fingers tapping against the bench’s seat in clear discomfort. “ _That’s_ gonna be a rough day to get through, huh?”

She pulled her lower lip into her mouth and chewed at it for a couple of seconds. Just by looking at their faces, she already knew the answer to the question she was about to ask. It didn’t stop her. “So…you guys really didn’t know?”

Ashley shrugged, eyes downcast and brow knit. A thinking face. This wasn’t _at all_ the conversation she’d been expecting to walk into.

“Seriously, I don’t think I would’ve realized until it like…came up on Facebook, or something.” He cringed as he said it, pushing his glasses up onto the top of his head with a groan. “ _Fuck_. I absolutely would’ve had… _no_ idea. Shit.” Chris pinched the bridge of his nose while he thought, feeling the first preemptive shudders of uneasiness come slithering in. If he hadn’t _said_ anything, if he’d _forgotten_ , the _conniption_ Josh would’ve had…ugh.

Sam blinked. If they didn’t know, that could only mean _one_ thing. Again, still consumed by the awful suspicion that she already knew their answer, she asked, “Does Josh not talk about the twins with you guys?”

“No.”

The response came like a slap—quick, sharp. Sam looked back to Ashley, who had finally lifted her gaze from the trail.

“He doesn’t. Not even, um…” Ashley realized what she was saying, cast a brief glance over her shoulder at the back of Chris’s head, pursed her lips in thought, and then continued anyway. “Not even when _we_ bring them up. If we do, he like…shuts down the conversation. I, uh, I figure it’s just hard for him to talk about.” It was a shoddy attempt to soften the statement, and she doubted wholly that either Sam or Chris bought into it. She chewed over her thoughts, knowing she was treading out onto thinner ice. “He gets mad at us if we do. So. We don’t press the issue.” Her back was to him, but she could still feel Chris’s shape stiffen up at that. So that was that. No more on that particular line of thought. She looked away from Sam again, hanging her head.

She’d suspected, she’d sort of _known_ , and _still_ Sam couldn’t help but watch their profiles with the faintest sense of despair. Waving her hand, she signed for Chris to scoot over, giving her enough room to join him on the bench. She pulled one of her legs up and bent this way and that until she found a semi-comfortable way to continue facing the two of them. “He didn’t even mention their birthday.” Unlike Ashley, her voice _didn’t_ waver at the end. It was a statement. A proclamation.

Ashley shook her head, her ponytail catching the sunlight as it flicked from side to side. The back of her neck was starting to burn.

“I take it that means he talks to _you_ about them?”

“Yeah.” She had anticipated the curtness of Chris’s tone, so it didn’t bother her as much as it could’ve. They were the Washington siblings’ secret-keepers, after all. The problem was, now there was only one sibling _left_ , so the secrets should’ve all been the _same_. It was rapidly becoming apparent that they weren’t. “Yeah, we talk about the girls a lot. We knew them better than anyone else, so,” Sam shrugged at that, “I’m sure it’s just easier that way, like you said, Ash. But he really doesn’t—”

Ashley met her gaze quickly, shaking her head once: left, right, center.

Sam shut her mouth.

And so they sat like that for some time, saying nothing and moving very little, save to occasionally nod at someone passing them on the trail or turn to the sound of a bird fluttering nearby. The sun was high in the sky, its heat nearly unbearable, reddening their faces the longer they sat out in the open.

It was Chris who finally broke the uncomfortable silence. He let his glasses drop back to their rightful place, the motion carrying with it a sense of acceptance. “We should do something for it. Their birthday, I mean. I don’t know _what_ , but…we should.” He huffed a tired breath through his nose, flinching at an unexpected buzz from his phone. “It’s gonna be…a bad day,” he repeated, rummaging in his pocket to check who was texting him.

“Do you think we _should_ , though?” Ashley asked, folding her arms across her chest. Without her hands gripping onto the bench, her balance grew much shakier, and she rocked back and forth to keep herself upright atop the bench’s backrest. “I mean…what’s going to make it _harder_ —doing a big _thing_ , or just sort of…” she fluttered her fingers airily, “…letting it go?” She turned to Sam, more interested in _her_ answer than Chris’s, but Sam wasn’t given any time to respond.

“We can’t just do _nothing_ , are you kidding me?” Chris frowned as he read whatever was on his screen. “If it looks like we _forgot_ , or we don’t _care_ , then that’s—that’s just not a good look, okay? I’m not saying we throw a _party_ , but we need to do _something_.”

She pressed her lips together to keep from saying anything further. Her balance toppled, and there was a dry _plumf_ noise when her sneakers hit the dirt. Ashley leaned the small of her back against the bench, arms still folded, fingers drumming aimlessly against the sleeves of her hoodie.

“We can think about it,” Sam interjected, trying to catch Ashley’s eye and failing. “We have a couple weeks…that’s plenty of time to come up with an idea.”

Chris swiveled around where he sat, gesturing to Sam even though Ashley still had her back to him. “See? Sam agrees. We’ll figure out something to do.” He slid his phone back into his pocket, getting up as he did so. “Any chance we can double back and head for the parking lot? It’s looking like I gotta bail—we’re having people over for dinner and Mom needs me to swing by the store, I guess.”

“Yeah, no problem! It’ll be an easier trip downhill, anyway.” Sam was suddenly very glad for the excuse to get moving again. This wasn’t the reaction she’d been anticipating from…uh, either of them, really. She had expected sadness, sure, and with Chris and Ashley there was always a significant degree of awkwardness, but the tension? Not so much. She tried to recall any time in the past where she’d felt even a _modicum_ of friction between the two of them and came up dry. It was like she’d said the secret code word that turned them into snippy sleeper agents.

As though to prove her point, Ashley brought up the rear during the whole trek back to the parking lot, puttering a few feet behind them. She’d grown quiet in the way she always seemed to when something was bothering her; the corners of her mouth had turned down, concentration creasing her forehead, eyes lowered but moving like she was reading some invisible novel. Inside the pouch of her sweatshirt, she picked at her nail polish until it fell away in chips. Every so often, she’d look up to the back of their heads, consider saying something, and then the moment would pass and she’d keep silently trailing after them.

“All right, well. This was. A lot. Can we make a pact that like, in the future, if any of us have difficult things we need to talk about, maybe we can do it where there’s some a/c?” It was an attempt to inject some levity back into situation, but it missed its mark. If Chris noticed, he chose not to bring any further attention to it. “Once I’m done with family shit tonight, we can…I dunno. Figure something out.”

“Yeah, sounds like a plan.”

He nodded towards his car, the taillights flashing as he hit the unlock button on his key fob. “C’mon, let’s roll out.”

Ashley didn’t want to think herself out of it, and if she waited any longer, she _would._ “I’m actually…gonna stick around, I think.” She paused and turned to Sam, the corners of her mouth twitching hopefully. “If that’s okay with you, I mean? I figured you’re probably gonna walk a little longer, but if you don’t want to have to drive me back, it’s fine, I know I’m out of the way—”

Sam’s smile was immediate. “I am _fine_ driving you back, Ash. Don’t even worry about it!” She turned to Chris, shooing him off, “Go on. scram. We’ll have some girl time.”

He seemed to think that over for a second or two, clearly not having expected the turn of events. “Uh, you sure?”

“Totally. I could go for a longer walk, stretch my legs out a little… _and_ I mean, it totally gives us some time to gossip about you behind your back.”

“Ooh, I am _so_ down.”

Chris groaned, shaking his head all the while. “ _Good luck_ with that. I dunno if you two have noticed, but I’m not really the most _interesting_ person.”

“Oh no, we’ve definitely noticed,” Sam intoned flatly, biting back her laughter when Chris flipped her off. “Go get your groceries. Don’t want Mommy yelling at you, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah, blah, blah…whatever.” He gave the two of them one last, lingering look, clearly still uncertain about Ashley’s decision to hang back. “Watch out for raccoons.”

“ _Raccoons?_ ”  
  
“I don’t know what lives out here—possums? Skunks? Whatever. I’ll catch you guys later, then.”

They watched as he backed out of his parking spot and pulled out of the parking lot, half-heartedly returning the wave he threw them in his rearview. Without turning away from the quickly shrinking silhouette of the SUV, Sam sighed. “So?”

“So?”

A scoff escaped her. “Out with it.”

“Out with what?”

She clucked her tongue reproachfully, setting her arms akimbo as she turned to her. “I know you think you’re slick and all that, but you look like you’re about to explode. So you should probably say whatever it is you’re trying not to.”

Ashley eyed her carefully, appearing equal parts sheepish and wary. “I don’t think I look like I’m gonna pop.”

“You _do_ , though. Like a balloon.”

And then, exactly like a balloon might, she _did_ pop, the words rushing out of her like so much helium. “Are you okay? Like for real? Because I—everyone’s always so worried about how _Josh_ is, and how _Josh_ is coping, and how _Josh_ is gonna feel about stuff, but Sam, I—it’s—are you okay?” If it was possible, she felt her face get even hotter. “With their birthday, and like, just…just everything, y’know? I feel like no one ever stops to ask if _you’re_ okay, or if _you’re_ upset, because the focus is always on Josh, and like…uh,” she swallowed hard. “He’s not the only one who cared about them, you did too, so…so are you okay?”

“Oh. Wow. Uh…hmm.” Sam would’ve paid good money to see the look on her own face just then. Tentatively, she pointed towards a different trail. “Do you wanna keep walking?”

Ashley only nodded. She strode out in front of Sam, self-consciously cupping her palms around her elbows. “Sorry,” she mumbled after some time.

“Nothing to be sorry about.” The path they’d taken was one of Sam’s favorites—the one that looped around the park’s gardens—but she was a little too distracted to enjoy the flowers with her usual gusto. She took some time to think over her next words as well, hemming and hawing before deciding. “And…I’m okay.” She nodded slowly, as though trying the phrase out; the nodding grew firmer and more resolved when she heard her own voice. “I am. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s gonna be a sad day. And probably a hard one, like Chris said, but…but it’s gonna be okay.”

“Are you _sure?_ ”

“I’m pretty ding-dang sure.” Sam smiled when Ashley let out a laugh, leaning over to nudge her with her shoulder. “I appreciate the concern. For real! It’s gonna be sad, and I’ll be sad then, but…” Shrugging, she spread her arms wide and watched her shadow stretch in reply. The uncomfortable internal vertigo was back, slapping her upside the head with the strangeness of the situation. A year ago—heck, _six months ago_ —if someone had told her she’d be having this discussion with someone who wasn’t Hannah (or Beth, or Emily…), she probably wouldn’t have believed it. If that same someone had told her she’d be having this discussion with _Ashley Brown_ , she probably would’ve laughed.

“I miss Hannah, and I miss Beth. A lot. And yeah, some days are way harder than others. Definitely. But wallowing in that doesn’t like…it doesn’t bring them back, I guess is the old cliché, but more than that, it doesn’t do… _anything!_ I have all these really great memories of them, fun memories, and it just seems like a waste to focus on what happened to them and the tragedy of that instead of all those awesome times we had together. Because the good memories outweigh the bad, you know? If that makes sense.” She took a moment to fan herself, wishing that she had suggested one of the shadier trails. “Sometimes we lose people…they leave our lives, they grow apart from us, they die…” she found herself shrugging again. “So what can you do but hang onto the good stuff?”

Ashley was quiet for a few seconds, mouth pursed in a contemplative shape. “I like that. I like that a lot.”

“Me too! Glad we can agree.” Despite the heat, Sam slung an arm around Ashley’s shoulders, letting her hand hang floppily. “Usually people get weird with me whenever Hannah and Beth come up. Like…they don’t know what to say. _Or_ they’re afraid I’m gonna break down in front of them, or something. So I really _do_ appreciate you asking, Ash. But I’m good! A-okay.”

“Well, good, then.” Managing a small laugh, she bonked her arm against Sam’s side, matching her stride so they moved as one unit. Her chest was still tight with a brewing tension, and she tried to exorcise it the only way she knew how: by continuing to babble. “I’m just…I’m really glad that you’ve been hanging out with us so much. I know the circumstances are, um, not ideal, but…I dunno, it feels like you’ve kind of _always_ been part of the group, and it’s just…I just always…” She stopped abruptly, catching the flesh of her lower lip between her teeth in a childish show of uncertainty. “I’m glad you’re okay, and I’m glad we’re friends, that’s all.”

Oh, well _that_ wasn’t going to fly. Sam furrowed her brow and picked up her pace, unslinging her arm and turning around to face her as she walked backwards on the trail. “Ah, ah, ah…I don’t think so.”

“What?”

She waggled an admonishing finger in her face. “Nope. You were gonna say something else. ‘I just always…’”

Ashley’s flush quickly rose to the roots of her hair, giving her the approximate coloring of an overripe cherry tomato. “It’s nothing! I thought about it in my head and it’s…definitely stupid.”

“I bet it’s not.”

“It _absolutely_ is.”

All at once, she stopped walking, giving Ashley no choice but to stop too, or run smack-dab into her. When Ashley stopped, Sam reached out and set her hands on both of her forearms in a gesture she hoped was more reassuring than strange. “This may surprise you, but I’ve heard a _lot_ of stupid stuff in my time. Like…a _whole_ lot.” The look Ashley fixed her with was less than believing. Sam raised her eyebrows defiantly; she knew when a challenge had been issued. “ _Oh?_ Oh, you don’t think so, huh? Uh huh, well…” she released her arms and started walking again, slowing her pace considerably. “You didn’t hear this from _me_ , but there was this like…three-month period where Hannah was just _obsessed_ with those stupid quizzes in fashion magazines. You know, the compatibility ones, the soulmate ones, yadda yadda, all that junk, right? So I’d get these super random texts from her at all hours, asking me things like ‘Would you describe me as more free-spirited or lackadaisical?’ or ‘Do you think Mike’s an Aries? He seems like an Aries to me.’” The thought actually made her grin—a real, honest-to-goodness grin. Sam lifted her arms high into the air before letting them drop back down to her sides in what might’ve been meant as a shrug. “And I love her, but man, it’s hard to get stupider than that.” She glanced at Ashley over her shoulder, and promptly felt her feet stop again. There was something strange in her expression, something Sam couldn’t name, and it had the sobering effect of weighing her feet to the ground like her shoes were made of cement.

“I always wanted to be more like you.” It all came out in a rush, as big things so often did with Ashley, leaving her swallowing hard around the fearful lump in her throat. She pushed on before she could lose her nerve, unable to meet Sam’s gaze. “In school, I mean. Like…even before we really even knew each other. I just, um…I always _wanted_ us to be friends, because you were just always so…I dunno, nice, and cool, and just…I’m glad we’re friends now.” She pushed a sweaty tendril of hair out of her face, folding her arms tightly across her chest like an armored breastplate. “That’s all I was gonna say. That’s it.”

Her jaw worked itself side to side for a while. She’d _heard_ Ashley, of course, but hearing and comprehending were beasts of two very different colors. “You…wanted to be more like _me?_ ”

“See? _See?_ Stupid, like I said.” Ashley shook her head, trying to walk around Sam. “Went and made shit weird, like I always do with my big, fat mouth.”

“It’s not weird! I’ve just never had anyone say that before. More like _me?_ I’m flattered, Ash, but I’m something of a hot mess on the _best_ of days, and—”

“You’re not, though. You’re not. You can say it all you want, Sam, but the fact of the matter is, you’re like…” she laughed, not out of humor or mirth, but something more akin to incredulity. “You’re like a superhero, do you get that?”

It was _Sam’s_ turn to laugh.

She smiled a taut smile and continued shaking her head as they walked. “Laugh! Go ahead! But you really are! You’re nice to people, no matter _what_. You’re always, _always_ thinking of other people first. You’re the one who’s always volunteering to help make things better, or cheer someone up, or deescalate some pointless fight, or _something!_ Even—even that first day at the lodge…after the prank…you were so _calm_ —”

“No, no, I really wasn’t—”

“Well you coulda fooled me, Sam, because you were cool as a flipping cucumber! You were the one who thought to pack bags and try the landline, and…and…you were just so _calm_ , and so _brave_ …” She trailed off for a second, rubbing at the back of her burnt neck. She fumbled with the hood of her sweatshirt, trying to bunch it up in such a way as to block the sun. “And you’re _always_ like that. Always. It’s why everyone likes you so much.”

“Oh come on, there are _tons_ of people who don’t like me!”

Ashley turned to her, eyes doleful, somehow. “There _aren’t_. For real. It’s like…impossible _not_ to like you. You want to help everyone, you want to make everyone feel better, and you _do_. I don’t think people could hate you if they actively _tried_ to. And I _mean_ that.”

She was quiet as they continued to walk, sliding her hands into her own back pockets. Sam had realized that, all of a sudden, she wasn’t sure what to do with her arms. Taking compliments had never been her strongest suit, in retrospect, and this was certainly not proving itself to be an exception to that rule. Really, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see she was nearly as red as Ashley, by then. “People don’t always appreciate the whole persistently helpful thing, just FYI.” Her voice dropped a bit as she said it. Huffing a breath, she ruffled her bangs from her sticky forehead, sorely wishing they were in a cooler part of the park. “Lotta times, they think it’s annoying. Or mom-ish.”

“Better than being a helpless little scaredy cat all the time. Did you know that when you sent Chris and me that text, the _first_ thing I did was panic?”

Sam looked up from her feet.

“Yeah, it’s…sort of my first move in _most_ situations: PANIC! In big, bold, flashy letters.” She held out her hands, flaring her fingers intro starbursts. “Like _Panic! At the Disco_ , only it’s usually more like _Panic! At the Grocery Store_ or _Panic! At the Unexpected Email_.” Another laugh burbled up out of her, sounding more embarrassed than anything else. “All I could think was ‘I did something wrong,’ and ‘Crap, I hurt Sam’s feelings somehow,’ and…well, mostly it was a lot of ‘oh no oh no oh no,’ because that’s how _I_ react in stressful situations.” Ashley turned to her, meeting her eyes, “You, though? You pack bags. You sit down and ask if everyone’s okay. Y-you…you talk about focusing on the bright side of grieving.” The last few words were carried on the rush of a sigh. “And I just…I _wish_ I was more like that, Sam. I’m sorry if that’s a weird thing to say, but I really…God, I wish I had it in me to be like you—brave and kind and strong, you know? That’s…yeah, that’s weird. Whatever. It’s true, though.”

The path finally grew darker as they stepped under the canopy of a copse of trees, the air around them dropping a few degrees. Both of them seemed to decompress at the same time, the sweat cooling on their faces.

“It’s not weird, by the bye.”

Ashley rolled her eyes, wiping her forehead with the back of her arm. “Uh huh. Okay.” Still, she snickered quietly, “Sounds _suspiciously_ like something you’d say to make someone feel better…”

“Shut it.” She poked her in the side, pointing to a bench tucked away in the shadow of two mammoth oaks. They sat, stretching out languidly, listening to the buzz of insects and the papery rustle of wind in the leaves. “Hey Ash—for what it’s worth?” Sam asked, tilting her head back into the blissful shade of the trees. “I’m glad we’re friends, too.”

A pause. And then, “Really?”

“Really really.”

Ashley smiled down at the trail, scuffing away a spot of mud from the toe of her sneaker and feeling better than she had since the first text had come in. “Cool.”

***

**Monday, June 30, 2014**  
**7:37pm**

“Aw fuck.”

“Huh?”

“Phone’s dyin’.”

“So why don’t you charge it?”

“Dunno where my charger is. Somewhere upstairs, I think.”

“You sure it’s not uhhhh…up your ass?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Have you _checked_ , though?”

“Aw dang, you got me there. Guess I _haven’t_ checked recently.”

“You should do that. That’s probably where it is.”

“I mean, it _is_ where I tend to store my valuables.”

“That’s what I’m _saying_ , man. So why don’t you…just…” He trailed off, the tip of his tongue poking out from between his teeth as he stared at the screen. The timer counted down from 4, 3, 2, and—“ _Suck it!_ ” Chris let the controller fall from his hands, victoriously punching both fists into the air. “Uh huh, uh huh, _that’s_ what you can do!” He grooved from side to side, shimmying his shoulders up and down as he did so. “Did you see that? Did you _see_ that?! Eleven headshots, my good sir. I’m telling you, the zombie apocalypse ever hits for real, I’m your fucking _dude_.”

“Oh yeah? You think it’s a one-to-one kinda deal, huh? You’re good at shoot-em-ups, so _clearly—_ ”

“I’m the hero Gotham needs, yeah. Haven’t you been listening? Or watching, I guess.”

“It was a lucky fucking round, Cochise.” Josh rolled his eyes, reaching behind himself to the table, feeling around blindly until he was able to find his drink. “I gave you that one. Also? Brush up on your comics, _my good sir_. Batman doesn’t use guns.”

He reeled back to face him, eyebrows raised high. “You _gave_ it to me, huh? Is uh…is that what the score says?”

Instead of answering, he took a long drink from his straw, maintaining eye contact even as he finished what was in the can, making horribly loud slurping noises.

“Mature. Subtle. Attractive.”

“You know how I do.”

Chris snorted a laugh and picked his controller up again, promptly starting a new match and launching the both of them into an online waiting room.

It was strange, really, how easily things had sort of just clicked back into place. Considering all the turbulence they’d been weathering, of late, it was unspeakably refreshing to be able to do this—sit around in the Washingtons’ basement, eating greasy shit and smacktalking each other. They hadn’t done that in…

He didn’t actually want to think about _how_ long it had been. That was a depressing line of thought. It had been a good, long while. But there they were, sprawled out on the floor, the PlayStation’s fan whirring at a million miles an hour, the roster for the next game slowly trickling in. Chris let himself hope that maybe— _maybe_ —this was the beginning of shit evening out again. After all, it wasn’t as though it had been the first time things had been strained between them. And yeah, okay, sure, fine, maybe the past few months had brought challenges a little more… _intense_ than they were used to. That was a fair point. But they were bros.

And bros were _always_ okay, in the end.

At least _almost_ always.

Josh lost the next match, and the next, and the one after that, consistently sucking in new and exciting ways. If he hadn’t completely blown the last match by literally just _standing_ in front of the enemies’ spawn point (like he’d been going door-to-door waiting to tell them about The Good Word of Jesus), Chris probably wouldn’t have noticed. But it wasn’t like Josh to _lose_ , much less lose that _badly_ , and that alone was enough to break him out of his own groove. “Hey, you got money on the other team or something?”

It took him a second to react. Which _also_ wasn’t right. “Hmm? Oh, ha, yeah, my bad.” Josh had been looking off somewhere (or _no_ where, to be more precise), gaze unfocused; when he turned back to him, it was with the impression that he’d only realized _himself_ that he’d zoned out. “Guess I’m just kinda…” he turned his gaze towards the stairs, blocking Chris’s view of his expression. “Distracted.”

“Uh…okay?”

The new match started up and to his credit, Josh tore his eyes away from the basement door long enough to absolutely get pummeled again. Chris was about to make fun of him again, just a teasing little jab, but Josh spoke up first, cutting him off. “Hey, so like…do you hear that shit?”

He frowned. “N…no? No. I hear the game, is that—”

Josh shook his head and stood, walking over to the laundry room door. He peeked his head in, disappearing from the shoulders up for an instant before reemerging. “For real, you don’t hear anything?”

Mhm. Sure. He’d played _this_ game before. Chris knew a setup when he saw one. Well that was fine, if Josh wanted to be a dunce, he could be a patsy. He leaned back against the front of the couch, stretching his legs out. “What is it I’m supposed to be hearing?” Grabbing his own drink, he went to take a sip, then paused, smirking jokingly over the rim of the can. “You trying to tell me you’re losing by reason of insanity? Hearing _voices_ , huh? _OoOoOooOOh!_ ” He snickered while watching Josh flit around the basement. “Dude. C’mon. What?”

The punchline was not forthcoming.

There was a moment, fleeting though it might’ve been, where Josh looked at him, and Chris could’ve _sworn_ he was being serious. It was only a flicker, though, gone in an instant, replaced with the ‘What? _Me?_ ’ look he got whenever revving up for something well and truly stupid. “I’m _telling_ you, I keep hearing like…this _song_.”

Chris sighed wearily, grabbing a handful of chips. “Sure it’s not just stuck in your head? It’s probably that fucking insurance jingle again. Hate that shit.”

He stood at the base of the stairs for an inordinately long time, his back to Chris, saying nothing but straining his ears. “Nah, I don’t think that’s it.” After another beat, he let it go, releasing his hold on the railing and resuming his seat on the floor. “You’re prolly right, just an earworm. Whatever. Quit stuffing your face, I got this one.”

“Uh huh, uh huh. ‘Course you do.” Chris chuckled, wiping his hands off on his pants before grabbing the controller again. He tried not to let on that he _knew_ , keeping his face open, pretending to be utterly absorbed by the game. Whatever Josh was up to, he’d go along with it. It would be another notch in the ‘Everything is fine’ counter; if they were back to pranking each other, then fuck, man, they were pretty much right back where they’d left off. The thought was a tempting one.

Not entirely unexpectedly, Josh _did_ win the next match. He paused just long enough to throw Chris a haughty sneer before they got back into the game in earnest.

But then he started losing again.

He started looking towards the door again. Not a lot, not constantly, but enough that it was noticeable.

After another brutal defeat, he cleared his throat. “You _really_ aren’t hearing that, huh?” he asked, voice _too_ casual.

“I really am not. And honestly, it’s starting to feel like maybe you’re just making up excuses for your shitty gaming skillz. That was ‘skillz’ with a z, by the way, in case you couldn’t tell by how I said it.”

He hummed in acknowledgement, clearly still distracted.

“I mean, I get it! No one wants to admit that they’re having a bad night, or that they keep falling prey to their totally handsome and hilarious bud’s epic pwnage, but—” Chris stopped when he saw Josh wasn’t paying attention to him _at all_. “Uh. Okay. I’m hearing jackshit, so I can’t help.”

Slowly, Josh turned back, watching him warily. He smiled, looking very much as though he didn’t _quite_ believe him. “Oh man, screw you, Cochise. You’re fucking with me. That’s totally your phone going, isn’t it?”

“No, dude! I don’t know what to tell you—look, it’s right there. Check if you want.” Offhandedly, he gestured in the direction of the coffee table where, lo and behold, his phone was dark and silent. “Maybe your mom’s watching tv upstairs?”

Josh was quiet for a time. A _suspiciously_ long time. When Chris finally turned away from the tv, there was something in his expression he didn’t like. His eyes were locked somewhere in middle space, his forehead creased with a frown; it was the look he had always gotten when stuck on a particularly gnarly homework problem. Again, it felt like he was being _serious._ Like maybe this _wasn’t_ a joke. “Yeah. Problem with that, though.” His mouth became a flat line. “Linda’s not home.”

Chris leveled his gaze at him, realizing he too was frowning. His eyes flicked upward to the ceiling as he thought. It was beginning to feel as though this wasn’t a prank after all. “Could you have…left something on up there?”

“Don’t know.”

They stared upwards together, both searching for… _something_. As though trying to convince himself, Chris grabbed the remote and hit the mute button, promptly cutting off the game’s idle music. He strained to catch any hint of what Josh was hearing, but there was nothing. Only silence. “Do you think someone’s in the house?” He’d lowered his voice into a conspiratorial drone.

“Woulda set off the security system.”

“Oh. Oh, right.”

They continued staring at the ceiling like that, Josh’s eyes narrow in concentration, Chris’s head cocked in such a way to help him hear. Still nothing.

“Do you…think we should check?” He looked to Josh, watched as he mulled the idea over, and then got to his feet when he did. “Maybe your neighbors are…I dunno, up to some fuckery.”

“Yeah,” Josh tried to keep some humor in his voice as he said it. “We do enjoy our fuckery around here.”

So they headed upstairs, Chris peeking through the curtains in the foyer to be sure the only car in the driveway was his own. Josh took up the lead, stopping every so often to judge whether or not he was still hearing…whatever it was he thought he was hearing.

The house was empty. Totally, completely, irrefutably empty. It was a sight that they were both more than used to, after years and years of Bob’s shitty filming schedules and Melinda always jetting to and fro to serve on some board or another. They’d spent plenty of nights with their run of the place, sneaking drinks from the liquor cabinet and poking their noses into places they didn’t necessarily belong. God, how many crappy ‘movies’ they’d made in that house.

But it didn’t feel all that warm or inviting just then. It felt quiet ( _too_ quiet, if one could pardon the joke), and menacing, in some eerie way.

Haunted.

As soon as he registered that _he’d_ thought that particular word up, Chris rolled his eyes. Groaning to himself, he shook his head, beginning the trek up to the second floor. “Hearing it yet?”

“Well _yeah_ , I was hearing it in the _basement_.”

“I meant can you figure out where it’s coming from? Is it like, getting _louder?_ ”

He considered it before shrugging. “Not really. Lead the way, I guess.”

“And it’s a _song_?”

“Song.”

“Like…instrument song? Or singing song?”

“… _singing song?_ ”

“Oh, for fu-you know what I mean!”

“Am I hearing disembodied trumpets, you mean,” Josh began, glancing about once they reached the landing, “Or…did I make you wander through the house because I’m hearing voices?”

Chris stopped and turned to him, expression exasperated, mouth a thin, tired line.

Smirking, he cupped his hands to his ears, going wide-eyed with shock and awe. “Wait, wait…they have another message for me…they’ve stopped singing, and they want me to tell you…oh no…oh _no_. Cochise, they want me to tell you…” He dropped the act and his hands, guffawing his usual, self-assured belly laugh. “That you _really_ gotta work on that whole gullibility thing. Seriously.”

“Man, fuck you! I knew you were messing with me.”

“You so did not!”

“I _did!_ God, you’re such a dick.” Still, he was laughing, slapping Josh’s hands as he tried to caress his cheeks.

Josh cooed at him mockingly, getting in one good cheek-stroke before getting pushed away. “In all honesty, you would last like five minutes in a horror movie, and I need you to know that I’m worried about you. Stop doing shit like following people through big, empty houses. It’s gonna get you killed one day.”

“Stop being a fuckface, and _then_ you can talk to me about lifestyle choices, okay??”

They snickered together there on the landing, the sound carrying through the still air. In that moment, they might’ve been ten again, or fourteen—the scales of the universe had tipped in exactly the right way, throwing them back into some sort of equilibrium. All was right again; all was as it had been.

Chris muttered another, “ _Fuck_ you” amid his laughter, then turned. “C’mon, now that you’re done with your stupid reindeer games, can we _please_ get back to it? I have a K/D ratio to work on, thank you very much. Wanna hit the leaderboards for next week’s rewards.”

Waving him away, Josh shook his head. “Nah, you go ahead. Since I’m up here, I should look around for my fucking charger. Gotta plug my phone in before it dies. Never know when someone’s gonna text you something important. Like nudes.”

“Nudes, huh?”

“I know the concept is alien to you, but there are plenty of people out there who want to show me their bits.”

“Keep telling yourself that. But all right, all right,” Chris said, holding both of his hands up to either side of his face, “Just don’t go getting pissed when I outrank you.”

He flapped his fingers in a familiar ‘blahblahblah’ pantomime. “I’m not _five_ , man, I think I’ll live. I’ll be right down.” Chuckling, he watched as Chris flicked him a quick Boy Scout salute before heading down the stairs, disappearing out of view. Josh leaned against the wall, smiling until he was _positive_ he heard the creak of the basement door swinging open. His face fell serious the _instant_ he knew he was alone again.

He closed his eyes and reached up to rub his face. He kept himself safely behind his palms for a long moment before dragging his fingers down his cheeks, briefly pulling his skin down into a decent reproduction of Munch’s painting _The Scream._ Or maybe something closer to _Home Alone_.

See, he’d lied. Yeah, yup, yes indeed, he’d gone and told a real whopper of a humdinger. But what was he _supposed_ to do? He couldn’t have _told_ Chris what was happening, not when it was so obvious that he wasn’t hearing _anything_. How was he supposed to explain that no, the music _hadn’t_ gotten any louder as they reached the upper floor of the house…but it had sure gotten _clearer?_ That wasn’t the kind of thing you told someone who was already half-convinced you were out of your mind. It didn’t exactly work in your favor.

He failed to suppress a shiver, hard as he tried. It was still so _quiet_ , so _faint_ , like it was far away or coming at him through a layer of cotton. If he had to place the voice, though, he thought he could do it.

And that was another lie. He _knew_ he could do it. It just might’ve taken a second try, was all.

Their voices had always been so similar.

Almost identical.

Already knowing he was right, he swallowed around the boulder in his throat and tried to ignore the way his heart was racing. He reached for the doorknob closest to him, slowly— _apprehensively_ —pressing his ear against the door. Josh closed his eyes, struggling to keep his lower lip from trembling. The voice behind the door was so clear. So _close_. The singer would’ve needed to be all but flat against the other side of the door, singing _through_ the keyhole for him to hear them as well as he was. Right there, only a couple of inches away. Before he could think himself out of it, he threw open the door and barged his way in.

But Hannah’s room was just as empty as it always was. Untouched. By his mother’s decree, no one had stepped foot in there since spring—no one had walked on the carpet, no one had looked at themselves in the vanity mirror, no one had breathed the air. No one since Hannah.

His knees threatened to go to mush, but he managed to keep himself upright. The doorknob was quickly growing warmer in his hand. Never in his life had his mouth felt so dry. He opened his mouth to speak, but the only sound he managed was a keening sort of squeak caught high in his throat. Josh closed his eyes again, wet his lips, and steeled himself against the wave of humiliated fear creeping up his windpipe, making him feel like a child too scared to call for their parents.

“Hannah?”

Nothing. Of course there was nothing, what had he been expecting?! The room was empty and Hannah was gone, lost somewhere deep in the mountains. Nothing would change that, _obviously_ , but…but he could still _hear_ it.

He looked over his shoulder to the door across the hall, charging over with the last of his emotional wherewithal. That one he opened more gently, trained by years and years of getting screamed at for barging in. The feeling of ridiculousness and terror was still there, still bitter on the back of his tongue, but he had to be sure.

“Beth?”

More of the same. Which was to say, _nothing_.

Staring into Beth’s room gave him the same hollow sensation looking into Hannah’s had—everything looked so sterile and pristine. His mom could’ve vacuum-sealed their rooms, laminated every surface, and they would’ve felt just as desolate. The items on their shelves were collecting dust, webs beginning to form lacy shapes in the ceiling corners. It was like those exhibits that traveled between museums: they’d closed up shop in the lodge and moved the show here, instead. Come one, come all, stand in the doorway and stare at all that remained of the Washington twins. No touching, please, and no flash photography…don’t want to startle the ghosts now, do you? Har-de-har-de-har-har.

He shut Beth’s door. He shut Hannah’s door. He stood there in the middle of the hallway, clenching and unclenching his hands in turn as he stared up at the ceiling, trying to convince himself that he _wasn’t_ hearing what he thought he was. Chris had to have been right, he tried to tell himself. It was definitely a song stuck in his head. That’s all it _could_ be.

…right?


	9. Where the twins (have a birthday)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can't believe we're almost (lol) at 10 chapters already! And now we're one month closer to that snowy stay in the mountains... ;)
> 
> As always, thanks so much for reading!! :)
> 
> Relevant tags for this chapter: Discussion of mental health and medication, discussion of grief and mourning, discussion of death, body horror, LOTS of talk about writing, bad baseball metaphors. You've been warned.

**Saturday, July 5, 2014**  
**10:53am**

> **CLOSE UP SHOT**
> 
> **Phone camera, shit quality. ECU on SC’s face. Image keeps shaking, assume because SC’s hands are trembling. All of SC is actually trembling.**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT, HYSTERICAL**  
>  **If anyone finds this, then we didn’t make it. Mom, I am so, so sorry, I didn’t mean—no, uh, but, my name is—**
> 
> **TRACKING SHOT**
> 
> **HD tries to wrestle the phone from SC, catches SC by surprise, so it’s not much of a fight. SC tries to take it back, but HD holds it up too high to reach.**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB**  
>  **Stop it, okay?! Stop it! We’re going to be fine—**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT, OPENLY SOBBING**  
>  **We’re not! We’re not! He lied to us! Why would he lie about that?! We can’t—**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB**  
>  **We’re going to get out of here, and we’re going to be—look at me, look at me!**
> 
> **HD’s hand on the back of SC’s neck, SC looks up, eyes huge, hyperventilating. HD leans down, suddenly very serious.**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB, WHISPERING FIRMLY**  
>  **We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to go find the others, tell them what we know, and get out through the kitchen window, do you understand me?**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT, WHISPERING, STILL CRYING**  
>  **But what about—**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB**  
>  **No buts. We’re going home, you get me?**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **O-okay. Okay. We can—**
> 
> **SC stops suddenly, looking directly into the camera, eyes widening, mouth falling open.**
> 
> **OVER SHOULDER SHOT**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB**  
>  **What? What?!**
> 
> **We can see HD’s mouth moving, but not entire face. Over shoulder, we see…**

But what _did_ they see? What, what, what? The killer? Man, fuck that—talk about cliché. One of the others? One of their friends? A survivor that they hadn’t expected? Maybe…maybe that would work…but it still wasn’t exactly _revolutionary_. It wouldn’t shock the audience, wouldn’t be good for much past the initial jumpscare. And did he _want_ jumpscares? Sure—jumpscares, tense music, and gore _galore_!—just…not right then. That moment needed to be something else. Whatever they saw over the other character’s shoulder had to be…something else, entirely.

Well, maybe he could move shit around later. Change a little something here, put that line of dialogue over there…

_Or_ he could just set the whole thing on fire and pretend he’d never even tried. That was starting to sound _real_ tempting.

Aimlessly, he scrolled up and down what he’d been able to squeeze out of his brain so far. It wasn’t a _lot_ , but he thought what _was_ there was probably pretty good. Pretty _damn_ good, actually. The problem was getting it all out, getting it onto paper. In his head, the thing was already done, already _magnificent_. The dialogue was crisp and clear in his head, the soundtrack was already primed and ready to go, he knew _exactly_ how the opening sequence would unfold, and the trailers? Hot damn, the trailers would be the best anyone had ever _seen_. So when he sat down in front of his computer and opened the writing document only to _consistently_ find he couldn’t get out more than fifty or sixty words at a time…that shit stung.

Were there problems? Sure, yeah, okay, maybe a few. For example: Yes, he knew the ambience he was going for, knew exactly where he wanted each character to experience a shock or slip and fall, but what the _fuck_ was this haunted mansion supposed to _look like?!_ He’d gone to some ridiculous lengths to try and nail that down, flipping through floor plans on the internet, browsing actual house listings, and on more than one occasion, firing up _The Sims_ and trying to _make_ the fucker himself. Never worked. That went _double_ for the characters. It was the _characters_ that were _really_ making him mad, though. There was only so much he could do with them until he _knew_ them.

Not that they were complete mysteries to him, of course. He had some grand ideas for his players, oh yes he certainly did. At its core, horror was fairly formulaic, meaning that only _certain_ character archetypes would even make _sense_ to appear in the first place. The scene he’d been working on that morning, for instance, had two of the old standbys: There was the Hapless Dweeb, the sap of an underdog who was the always butt of every other character’s jokes, and then the Scaredy Cat, the one who unironically yelled out things like ‘This isn’t funny, you guys! I’m not kidding around!’ and usually produced the flick’s first _real_ scream. Rarely anyone’s _favorites_ , true, but necessary pieces of the puzzle. Horror just wouldn’t be horror without the tears, the shrieks, the cowering, the _schadenfreude_ those two offered. After all, if they weren’t there, who else was supposed to fuck around with the Ouija board? Hmm?

So he _had_ them, and he _recognized_ them.

But did he _know_ them? What they looked like, sounded like, dressed like? No. No he didn’t have _any_ of that shit.

And he’d tried every trick in that book for _that_ , too. Tried creating a cast list in his brain, to no avail. Fired up a few video games with character creators, and that too was a _sobering_ failure. In the end, he’d decided to make another attempt at sketching out what they _might’ve_ looked like, who they _could’ve_ been. They were already vague, humanoid shapes in his brain, weren’t they? Surely he could get them down onto paper!

Famous last words.

The problem was (and he was _loath_ to admit it) that it just…wasn’t that easy. Every time he tried to draw something— _anything_ —for the project, it came out wrong.

Really, really wrong.

Incredibly, unspeakably, insurmountably wrong.

As he moved his hand across the sheet laid out in front of him, he realized with the same sort of leaden disappointment that it was happening _again_. Instead of finishing, he let the pencil clatter onto the desk, falling across the graphite face like some terrible anime scar. He cast a last look at the blinking cursor on his laptop screen, down to the sketch, and pushed himself away from the desk.

He flopped down onto his bed, checking his phone as he went, flicking it haphazardly onto the bedside table when he saw there was nothing new. He groaned and shut his eyes, going so far as to pull his pillow out from under his head, using it instead to block the light from his eyes. The world took on a strange, muted quality as he hugged it to his face, the thick memory foam doming easily around his ears. The stillness, the quiet, the dark…it all lent itself to the atmosphere of a video game’s pause screen. Nothing to see here, folks; nothing to _do_ , either.

It was hard to say how long he stayed sprawled on his bed like that, unresponsive and dead to the world. Before _too_ long, though, the air under the pillow went hot and stale, leaving him little choice but to pull it back off of his face. He grumbled to himself as he sat up, pivoting around so he could rest his elbows down on the windowsill.

Josh propped his chin up on his arms as he stared out across the sprawling expanse of the backyard. His eyes found the pool, so strangely still and glass-like, a few scummy green leaves collecting at the corners and edges, begging to be skimmed off. Outside, the day was thick with what was either a low-hanging fog or the smoky remains of last night’s fireworks display, giving everything a dull, greyish cast. It felt suiting, really. Foggy day, foggy brain.

Only hey, guess what? He wasn’t supposed to _have_ a foggy brain anymore. Wasn’t _that_ a kick in the ass? He was supposed to be wheelin’ free and easy, tapping into that thick vein of creative genius that’d been cocooned behind the gauzy web of medication since—

Well _fuck_ , _there_ was the poetic bullshit he’d been trying to get at, earlier. Funny how it happened like that.

His head thunked lightly against the windowpane, sure to leave a smudge later. As he watched, a ghostly ripple slid across the water of the pool, brought on by some breeze or bug or fallen leaf. On a sunnier day, the movement would’ve sent sparkles of light glinting every which way through the yard; as it was, with the sun nowhere to be seen, the visual was more like the oil slick Mario jumped into to get to Hazy Maze Cave.

From within the ripples of dark water, something seemed to move. Josh frowned, narrowing his eyes as he shifted his position, trying to get a better view of the pool. The water was dark under the sky, but if he really strained, it was almost like there was something… _there_ , just there, below the surface. The fuck could _that_ have been? He cupped his hands to the window as he pressed his face closer, blocking out the light of his room. Something was…something was _definitely_ moving, in there.

“The fuck…” he mumbled to the dead air, his breath clouding the window. He angrily wiped it away with the heel of his hand, doing his best to clear the glass so he could see—

“What’re you working on?”

There were not words enough in the human language to express the intensity of the surprise that shot through him at the sound of the voice. He sucked in a deep, dizzying breath, whirling around in time to see his mother bending over his desk, ostensibly reading through what was on the screen. Before he could really even process what he was looking at, he was up and off of his bed, crossing the short distance to his desk. “ _Jesus Christ_ , Ma! You taking ninja lessons or something? Popping in here like a freaking _ghost_.”

She favored him with a glance that was too brief for him to parse whether the expression on her face was amused or _confused_ before turning her dark eyes back to his screen. “I knocked for a good minute, out there! When you didn’t answer, I wanted to make sure you were all right. So what’s all this about, then?”  
  
“It’s…nothing. Nothing, just…” He managed to sidle his way between his mom and the desk, closing his laptop with a quiet _click_. “It’s not important.” Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered just _when_ it was that life had changed so much that porn _wasn’t_ the most embarrassing thing his mom could find on his computer. He wanted to laugh at that, but it didn’t strike him as particularly funny in that moment. “Just something to keep me busy. Something wrong? What’s going on?”

Melinda straightened up from her lean, fixing him with another one of those funny looks. Josh didn’t like that look, didn’t like it _at all_. It was the sort of look you gave someone when you couldn’t figure out whether what they’d just said was supposed to be a joke or not. “You never came down for lunch. I thought I’d check to see if you were hungry.” A hint of a smile flickered across her face, momentarily making her look _distressingly_ like Beth. “Is that a _crime?_ ”

“I’m _fine_. Isn’t it a little early for lunch, Ma?”

Again with the funny look. “It’s almost two.”

He blinked.

That didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Did it?

Unless he was wrong (and sure, yeah, okay, he _could’ve_ been wrong), the clock hadn’t even read eleven when he’d been drawing. That would mean he’d been looking out the window for the better part of… _three hours?_ Maybe he’d actually fallen asleep earlier, when he’d been lying down? Yeah, that made a little more sense. That could be right.

So why didn't it _feel_ right?

As though it had been waiting for his brain to catch up, his stomach audibly growled. He looked down at it, feeling betrayed by his own body. “Uh…guess I got caught up in what I was doing. Yeah, I could go for some grub.”

She nodded absently, her eyes having fallen back to his desk. There was a small, unimportant sound as she brushed the pencil away, sending it rolling across the desk. “Oh, is it something for your friends?”

“Is _what_ something for my friends?”

Her fingers twiddled in the general direction of his closed laptop before she picked up the sketch. “Whatever was just on your computer.”

His cheeks puffed out in a sigh. “No. It’s not. It’s just a…” Shit. He could lie, he could _definitely_ lie. She was a great many things, but a detective Melinda Washington was _not_. Honestly, he doubted she was paying enough attention to really _care_ , one way or another, but…but the truth would end the interaction entirely. Shut it down, so to speak. Lock it up so that maybe—just _maybe_ —she wouldn’t bring it up again. Ever. “It’s a therapy thing. For Alan.”

He had expected her to clam up at that, bristling away from the mention of Hill in the way she always did (averted eyes, shoulders taut, very quickly changing the subject). And even if she’d chosen that day to suddenly be a-okay with the prospect of buckling down and talking about Feelings and Emotions and all sorts of other complicated, sticky things that couldn’t be mopped up with money, he’d expected her to at _least_ shoot him a pitying look. But neither of those things happened. Instead, she just held the sketch, mouth puckering into a strange shape. “Then why were you…”

The desire to groan was strong. He surprised himself by swallowing it down. “Why was I _what,_ Ma ?”

She squinted down and held the picture at arm’s length, raising her eyebrows in the pained expression _everyone_ over the age of forty-five seemed to take on whenever attempting to see something smaller than a football stadium’s Jumbotron. “Why are you drawing Chris?”

There wasn’t a lie he had prepared for that one. Fuck, there wasn’t a _truth_ he had prepared for that one.

Because that was the question, wasn’t it?

Why _did_ all of his character sketches end up looking so familiar? Why was it that whenever he tried to put faces to his characters’ names, the eyes that stared up at him were all _theirs?_ Why was it _always them?_

Why, indeed?

***

**Sunday, July 6, 2014  
4:30pm**

“Don’t put them away like that!”

“Don’t put them away like _what_ , Ash? Jesus Christ, I’m just—”

With one deliberate, jerky movement, she plucked the knife from the dishwasher, turning it upside down before letting it drop into the cutlery basket again. “Don’t put them in there sharp-side-up! Are you kidding me? What happens if someone’s walking by later and they _trip_ and fall? They’re gonna get _impaled_ on that thing!”

“They’re gonna—okay. Hang on. Hold up a second. Is this honestly the kind of shit you sit around thinking about in your downtime? People accidentally falling onto the knives in their kitchen?”

“It _happens_ , Chris.”

“It doesn’t, Ash.”

“Most household accidents happen in the kitchen!”

He sighed, holding her gaze as he dropped another knife into the dishwasher (sharp-side- _down_ ). “There. Happy?”

“It’s not—don’t look at me like I’m crazy! Who wants to get _stabbed_ unexpectedly?!”

Chris’s eyebrows drew inwards and upwards as he held his hands out. “ _Why_ did you feel the need to slap ‘unexpectedly’ on that? I don’t think anyone ever _expects_ to get stabbed.”

She turned her nose up, folding her arms across her chest. “If they leave their knives and forks pointing up in the kitchen, they _should_ expect it.”

“Do you ever stop and listen to the words that come out of your mouth? For real? Do you? You’re like one of those PSAs from the 60s. ‘Remember, always wash your knives upside down, or else the commies’ll getcha! This message brought to you by the friendly people at—’”

“Do _you_ ever get tired of hearing _yourself_ talk?”

“Uhh…no, not really.”

The Hartleys’ kitchen always had a bit of a golden cast to it, regardless of the time of day. Maybe it was something to do with the overhead light fixture, maybe something about the décor, but Sam suspected it was _mostly_ a psychological thing—something about the lingering smell of cinnamon and near-perpetual heat from the oven. It was the kind of kitchen you pictured when listening to fairy tales or Christmas stories, the kind of kitchen where you always expected to be offered a cold glass of milk (usually you _were_ ) or find a plate of fresh cookies (usually you _could_ ). She sat at the old mahogany table, legs stretched out on the chair next to her, watching the two of them from over her shoulder, doing absolutely nothing to hide her grin.

It was a peculiar thing, being the person on the outside looking in. She’d done it with Hannah too, that much was certain, but the comparison was quickly starting to feel _wrong_ to her. She’d been her best friend, and God, she’d loved her, but at the end of the day, Hannah and Mike had been a pipe dream—the sort of thing you read about in YA novels or _Cosmo_ quizzes. And it could've just been affection clouding her judgment, but there was no shaking the feeling that Chris and Ash were _different_. They weren’t a hypothetical, they weren’t even a possibility…they were an _inevitability.  
_

Sure, Hannah and Mike had been friends, insomuch that _anyone_ sharing the same basic social rung in high school could be considered friends, but Chris and Ash were _friends_. They knew each other, understood each other, and even when they argued, it was with the well-practiced restraint of an old married couple. They could snap at each other and be fine five minutes later, they knew exactly what to say (and perhaps more importantly, what _not_ to say) to one another in any given circumstance, they knew how to tiptoe around sore spots, they knew where the line was and how best to avoid crossing it.

But _shit_ , sometimes they were dense. _Sometimes_ , she really wanted nothing more than to grab them both by the shoulders and shake some sense into them. Today, though, sitting in the Hartleys’ kitchen, feeling the comfortable weight of her phone in her hands, was _hardly_ one of those times.

She glanced away just in time to catch a significant look pass between the _other_ two in the kitchen. Jamie Brown and Colleen Hartley were, for all intents and purposes, just as obvious a unit as their children were. They even cut a similar profile: Colleen with her blonde hair and easy smile, Jamie with her pinched face and tendency to startle at unexpected noises. They were standing at the other end of the kitchen, Jamie leaning against a counter, Colleen checking a pan of rolls that had been left to rise, and Sam caught them _just_ at the right moment—they looked to their kids, then to each other, and it was clear enough at once that whatever Sam had been thinking, they’d likely been thinking too. She let her eyes drop back to her phone before they could feel the weight of her stare.

They were sweet, their moms. She liked them very, very much. But it was hard to see them, see Chris and Ashley interact with them, and not spare a thought for her _own_ mother. And _that_ …well, that was its own can of worms. There were bigger and badder cans to worry about, at that moment, full of bigger and badder worms.

“So?” Sam looked back up as Chris slid into one of the empty chairs at the table, leaning forward to peek at her phone’s screen. Apparently ‘How to Load a Dishwasher 101’ had just let out. “What’s the sitch? What’re we doing?”

She shrugged, letting her phone clatter onto the table for the world to see. “You got me. Still no answer. He’s probably doing something—”

“Oh come on. That doesn’t mean jack, he’s _always_ got his phone on him. You would be shocked and appalled to know some of the things he’s done while texting me. _Shocked,_ I tell you.”

“Yeah, pass, thanks.” Ashley dropped into one of the other chairs, blowing upwards to ruffle her hair out of her face. “Some mental images are better left unformed, thank you very much.” She reached for one of the apple slices on the plate that had been left out for them (because of _course_ fruit plates were common fare in the Hartley House), brought it to her lips, and stopped just short with a quiet scoff. “Well, well. How’s the adage go? Speak of the devil and he appears?” Crunching into the apple, she nodded her chin towards Sam’s phone, still lit brightly with a new notification.

“Number one: Ash, no one says that. Except maybe grandmas. Number two: Sam, told you so.”

Sam laughed along with them as she swiped to unlock her phone. As she read, her expression slowly began to change, brow knitting and lips pursing. “Hmm…”

“Hmm?” Ashley shifted in her seat to try and spy on the message, still primly holding her apple slice between two fingers. “What’s wrong? You look like… _seriously_ consternated.”

“Ew. Not at the dinner table.”

“Const _ernated_ , Chris. Uneasy. Anxious. Concerned.”

“Then _say_ that! Christ. Some of us had to rely on our math skills to get through the SATs.”

“And even _then_ , it was a close call.”

“Hey! Wow. Ouch. First I can’t put dishes away the right way, now _this?_ Whaddid I ever do to _you?_ ”

As they quipped, Sam picked her phone up, tapping her thumbs against its sides while she reread what Josh had sent. “He _says_ they’re doing a ‘family thing.’” Looking back up to the two of them, she let her shoulders rise and fall in a disappointed shrug. “I mean…that makes sense, doesn’t it? They’re gonna want to be together for the day, right?”

In unison, Chris and Ashley flashed tight, uncomfortable smiles her way. They were more _grimaces_ , really, but they were _trying_ to be smiles. “…yeah…” Chris said slowly, the corners of his eyes wrinkling in a way that suggested he thought Sam was just about as wrong as wrong could be. “A family thing would make sense.”

“He’s lying.” It was strange, how Ashley could make it sound like a statement of fact instead of an accusation. “Josh, not Chris,” she added, as though either of them had needed the clarification. “Sam, like…” she glanced towards Chris quickly, almost as though asking for approval. She sighed and clucked her tongue, finishing what was left of the apple. When she spoke next, she held her hand in front of her mouth, and her words were thick around her chewing. “There’s not really a nice way to say it, but like…I think _all of us_ know that the Washingtons don’t really… _do_ ‘family things.’” She threw in the air-quotes for good measure. “Not since his dad made it big, at least.”

“ _Made it big_ ,” Chris parroted, clearly trying to deflect the discomfort of the moment. “For real?”

There was no denying it, though. Ashley wasn’t _wrong_. The three of them had had their own individual windows into the Washingtons’ lives, differently shaped, some larger or clearer than others, but even from their limited viewpoints, it was obvious how very, very distant Josh and his parents had grown since losing the twins. Sam had heard more than her fair share of stories about family vacations and outings, sporting events and movie releases, lavish trips to summer homes and even just run-of-the-mill holidays, but now? Now that the dust had settled and it was clear Hannah and Beth weren’t coming home?

Not so much. Bob seemed to _always_ be working, Melinda seemed to _always_ be busy with something, and Josh…he always seemed to be alone in that house.

After about an eternity, she nodded her head. “Yeah…he’s lying,” Sam sighed, missing the look Chris gave her, so focused was she on the phone screen.

“Aw, c’mon guys, why would he lie about that?” Chris felt his mouth tighten despite himself. “Maybe they really _are_ —”

Ashley shook her head, getting up to relocate, moving to the chair next to Sam after gently nudging her legs off so that she could sit. “No way. He just doesn’t want this to be a thing.”

“Too bad, so sad. It’s already a thing. A capital-T Thing, even.”

“Yeah. He’s not really a fan of capital-T Things unless _he’s_ the one planning them.”

“Oh weird! Sounds a little like someone else I know.”

“Shut _up_.” Ashley spotted Chris reaching for the plate in front of her and halfheartedly smacked his hand away; Sam guessed the contact was barely enough to be _felt_ , let alone _hurt,_ judging by the tiny sound it made, but she watched with amusement as Chris recoiled with a wince of agony. He reached over and smacked her hand back, and before long, the two were embroiled in a ridiculously childish slap-fight.

“I’m starting to understand why no one invites you guys to parties.” Her phone had gone dark in the time she’d been mulling over what to say, so she woke it back up and stared at the text thread before her. “Come on, what do I do from here? Do I just… _tell_ him what we want to do? Maybe that’s the way to go, just be open about it.”

“Honesty _never_ works, Sam,” Chris scoffed with an undue intensity. “Do you have _any_ idea what he’s gonna do if you say ‘Oh hey, we were gonna stop by and hang out because we think you might be feeling _emotionally vulnerable?'_ I know what’ll happen.” He _did_. “It won’t be what you want to happen.” It _wouldn’t_ be. No one— _no one_ —knew that better than he did. “We can’t mention the twins _at all_.”

“Then what do _you_ suggest?”

“I mean…” Lifting her hands innocently, Ashley shrugged a single shoulder. “ _I_ know how we could find out whether he’ll be home or not…or at least whether he's really doing something with the family...” As her voice trailed off, she looked to Chris, mouth curved into a mischievous shape.

His shoulders sagged as he registered what she was aiming for. “Fuck me, Ash, can’t we leave them out of it? You know how they’re gonna get—”

“ _Them?_ ” Sam asked.

From across the table, Chris made a curt ‘shut up’ motion, swiping his hand across his throat. Too late. The damage was already done.

“Mrs. Haaartley?” Ashley whispered, voice only loud enough for them to hear around the table. She smirked as she said it, and Sam was almost alarmed at how charmingly wholesome Ashley was able to make it sound. You could just _hear_ the whole fucking word, ‘ _Missus_ ,’ u-and-all, as though she were some ancillary character on an episode of _Leave It to Beaver._ “I can go louder, if you want. I’m like…super convincing. And adorable.”

Chris groaned loudly, but still lolled his head to the side to better project his voice. “You’re _something,_ all right. Hey Mom? Any chance you could call Linda, maybe?”

Two moms for the price of one! Both Colleen _and_ Jamie turned at that, their expressions comically similar masks of suspicion. Neither said anything, obviously waiting for Chris to explain. When he didn’t, Colleen sighed, “And why would I do that, child of mine?”

“Josh is lying to us,” Ashley said matter-of-factly.

Sam nudged her with her arm, turning to them as well. “We want to surprise him with something on Thursday, and we need to be sure he’s _home_. He’s making it sound like there’s a family event going on…”

“But he’s _clearly_ lying to us.” Ashley returned Sam’s nudge.

Colleen and Jamie exchanged another glance, one that wouldn’t have been at _all_ out of place on Chris and Ashley’s faces. It was either endearing or eerie, and Sam couldn’t quite figure out which.

“So…let me get this straight.” It was Jamie who spoke up that time, the lines of her eyes crinkled upwards in a disbelieving smile. After years of listening to students give ridiculous excuses for why their grades should be higher, it was an exceptionally well-practiced expression. “This is an _undercover_ job? Call Melinda up, shoot the breeze, just casually bring up whether or not there are any big family plans on the horizon?”

“Pretty much,” the three of them answered, more or less in unison.

“Uh huh. Okay. And pray tell, what’s so special about Thursday?”

The answer didn’t come as quickly that time. Chris let out a long, pained breath in a low ‘oof,’ Ashley became unnaturally interested in the apple slices in front of her, and Sam felt an uncomfortable lurch somewhere in her lower gut. They looked around the table at each other, each silently wondering when and why and how _this_ was what it had all come to…and then, surprising _everyone_ , Ashley turned back to Jamie and Colleen.

“It’s Hannah and Beth’s birthday.”

_Ding ding ding!_ And there it was, folks: The secret phrase. There was no look shot between them then, just an abrupt rush of movement. Colleen grabbed a pair of reading glasses from off of the counter, pulling her cellphone out and squinting down at it as she scrolled through her contacts. Jamie watched her for an instant before crossing the kitchen to the table where they were sitting. She set her elbows down on the tabletop, glancing over her shoulder at Colleen once more. “What kind of surprise were you all thinking of? Not the kind involving jumping out from behind couches, I hope.”

None of the parents had seen the video (fuck, even _Chris_ _and Sam_ hadn’t seen the video), so there was no _way_ Jamie could’ve understood the grave irony of what she’d suggested. That didn’t stop it from stinging. The three of them grit their teeth against the acidic wave of déjà vu, bearing it as best they could.

Sam shook her head. “We just don’t want him to be alone. That’s all.”

“Well that’s…very thoughtful of you guys.” She spoke the word ‘thoughtful’ in a manner that suggested it hadn’t been her first choice. Whatever she had _meant_ to say, her tone smacked more of uncertainty than disapproval. Her eyes seemed to search her daughter’s face, but for _what_ , neither Sam nor Chris could tell. It was enough to make them wonder whether Jamie had _needed_ to see the video to understand; it was enough to make them wonder how much Jamie only suspected, and how much she _knew_. “Let’s see if Melinda picks up, huh?” She straightened up as she spoke, brushing the palms of her hands against the sides of her jeans. “You want to talk about _surprises_ …”

“She doesn’t usually answer her phone?” Sam asked, only momentarily looking down at her own.

“ _Ha!_ For lowly little—” In much the same way Ashley sometimes did, Jamie seemed to realize what she was saying only as she was saying it. She stopped, smiled knowingly, and shook her head. “She’s a busy lady,” she said, delivering it with a weight that made Sam think there was more to the story. “And we run in different circles.”

“You’d think you’d be a little _old_ for stupid high school drama, huh, Mom?”

“Ooh boy, do I have some _rough_ news for you three,” Jamie sighed, hunching over the to set her hands on Sam and Ashley’s shoulders. The look she gave them was equal parts apologetic and amused. “Stupid high school drama _never_ ends. Never. Never, ever, ever.” She patted the girls’ shoulders. “You just get older and learn even more unhealthy ways to cope.”

“Thanks,” Ashley said flatly. “You always know _just_ how to make everyone feel better.”

“One of my many, many talents.” She dropped a kiss into Ashley’s hair and rejoined Colleen at the other end of the kitchen, leaning over her shoulder to try and eavesdrop on her phone conversation.

***

**Thursday, July 10, 2014**  
**2:03pm**

“This is the part where you ask how I’m holding up today, right?”

There was an amused glint in Hill’s eyes as he cocked his head to the side, watching Josh as one might watch a chess player make a particularly intriguing opening gambit. “Oh, is it? Terribly sorry, I must be behind, then. Would you _like_ for me to ask you how you’re holding up today?”

“No. But let’s be real here, has it ever stopped you before?”

“I suppose not—not if we’re ‘ _being real_ ,’ that is.” Hill had an odd tone he reserved specifically for repeating slang; it wasn’t a _cruel_ tone, and strangely enough, never served to upset him. Really, it always seemed to make it sound as though he was poking fun at both himself and Josh all at once. Like some sort of inside joke only they had. “Is there something… _special_ about today that might bear discussion?”

He rolled his eyes and looked down to the face of his watch, tapping at it dully. “You know there is,” he said, words heavy on his exhale.

“Do I?” His tone was curious, but only mildly so. The question was, as so often was the case with Hill, rhetorical, and Josh knew he didn’t need to _give_ an answer for it to be understood.

But he was in something of a talkative mood, as it turned out. Josh nodded once, eyes still turned down to his watch. “It’s my sisters’ birthday.”

“Oh.”

No notepad, so that was good. Or he hoped it was good, or he thought it was good, or something somewhere in the middle. “Yeup. Woulda been nineteen. Weird to talk about ages like that, huh? ‘Would have been.’ Weird.”

“ _Very_ weird,” Hill agreed.

From the tension electrifying the air between them, it was obvious Hill had expected some sort of follow-up to the comment. None came. It had been a… _trying_ day, to say the least. Josh didn’t want to dwell on it—wouldn’t have _wanted_ to dwell on it, even had there not been anything more sinister looming in the shade of his brain. He frowned without really recognizing it, eyes following the complicated lines and colors of the triptych behind Hill’s head. He’d tried to look it up on the internet once or twice, and come up dry every time. Had Hill painted it himself? It seemed at once absolutely unlikely and perfectly believable. It was a scary thing, regardless of whoever made it, a hellish scene of twisted, emaciated people, faces contorted in abject agony. It was all reds and whites and yellows and greys, the colors of fever and infection. In the very front of the center panel, way down low, was the worst of it, the part that always seemed to draw his eye if he let himself focus on it for too long: A young woman so thin that her skin appeared translucent, her own spindly fingers hooked into the curve of her ribs above the terrible, gaping chasm of her torso. She seemed to be tearing herself open, her mouth stretched far too wide, her eyes huge and sunken in the pits of her skull.

Had he glanced down, he might’ve spotted Hill slowly turning to follow his line of sight. “I believe we were talking about your sisters?”

“We _were_ ,” he agreed. “And then I realized I’ve been meaning to ask you something since we met. What was that? Like…” Quickly, he counted it out on his fingers. “Shit, like, almost a year ago, huh?”

“Close enough, I suppose.”

“How does that thing not scare off your patients just… _immediately?_ ” Looking to Hill, he pointed towards the painting. “You mind?”

Hill watched him for a moment, cheeks hollowed out in thought. And then he stood, taking a step back from his desk to allow Josh more room. “By all means,” he said, sweeping an arm out towards the painting.

He stood from his chair and walked around the desk, actually standing _behind_ it. There was an instant (and that’s really all it was—an _instant_ ) where he was consumed with the feeling of _wrongness_ , of being in some forbidden land, perhaps trespassing in the teacher’s lounge or an employee’s only area. Standing _behind_ the desk felt nothing like sitting in front of it. Josh shot Hill a sidelong glance before turning his attention fully to the triptych, eyes scanning the scene in painstaking detail. “It’s…”

“Horrific?” Hill tried, chuckling as he clasped his hands behind his back, looking every inch a sophisticated art critic as he stood alongside Josh, face tipped up to the canvases. “I’ve been told.”

“You really think this is what people want to look at when they come into therapy, Alan?” Josh asked, angling his head to follow the lean of what appeared to be a devilish minion dragging a body out of frame.

Hill made a low noise in response, not quite a laugh, not quite a hum. “It hasn’t driven _you_ off yet, now, has it?”

“Guess not.” Where he stood, he could see the young woman with a horrible clarity. Her dark hair, not unlike the twins’, flowed behind her, though it seemed to be falling out of her scalp in ragged clumps, revealing the pale skin beneath. Skin that was so thin, so delicate, that he could actually see the dark, serpentine shapes of her veins underneath, forking this way and that. There were holes in the flesh, he could see, jagged tears that showed no muscle, but plenty of creeping rot and decay. Her eyes, horrible and bulging even from behind the desk, were covered in dull white cataracts, clouding over whatever color had been there in her waking life, whatever sight her pupils had once been capable of. “It _is_ awful.”

“You’re still staring at it.”

Josh felt himself grin despite his best efforts. “Yeah, well. I happen to _like_ awful things.”

“ _Monstrous_ things?”

“Those are the things I like _best_ , as it turns out.” He gave one last look to the skeletal girl before the novelty of the situation wore off and he found himself feeling particularly vulnerable. Sitting across from Hill was one thing, but standing next to him? Realizing they were almost of a height? It caused an unpleasant cognitive dissonance behind his eyes, thrumming like the beginning of a headache. Thinking of Hill as a _person_ was odd. Like seeing your boss out in the wild, grocery shopping or some shit. Or finding yourself in the Taco Bell line in front of your old math professor. Before he could let himself go too far down _that_ rabbit hole, he circled back around the desk to his chair, making himself comfortable once more. “You gonna tell me that _all_ your patients are as warped as me, Alan? Is that what we’re talking about here? You can keep the spooky art out on display because _all_ of your little kiddies consider themselves deeply twisted edgelords?”

“While I can assure you I can’t even begin to _fathom_ what an ‘edgelord’ is, I’d be more than happy to answer that question for you.” Hill sat as well, sniffing airily as he straightened out the papers on his desk. “That is, if _you’re_ willing to provide an answer to a question of _mine_.”

The grin resurfaced. “‘ _Quid pro quo, Dr. Lecter.’_ ”

Though Hill didn’t immediately respond to _that_ , Josh thought he might’ve seen the faintest flicker of amusement in his eyes. “What I’ll tell you is this: As is the case with a great many things in life, _fit_ is an incredibly important part of a successful doctor-patient relationship. Just like with acquaintances or friends or lovers, you’re much more likely to spend time with—and appreciate spending time with—people in possession of similar views as yourself. You wouldn’t enjoy passing time with your friends if you had nothing in common, would you? Of course not! So why should a doctor be any different, hmm?”

“So, according to that logic…you don’t have spooky shit because I’m your patient; I’m your patient because you have spooky shit?”

“Something like that.” He didn’t waste much time in determining whether or not it was a good enough answer for Josh, he simply launched into his own question, perhaps in some gambit to catch him off his guard. “Do you have plans for the rest of the day?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

He considered that, looking over Josh’s face carefully. “Your parents I can understand.”

Josh scoffed audibly, “Glad _one_ of us does.”

“However, I’m finding it quite difficult to believe, given everything you’ve told me about them, that your friends wouldn’t be reaching out to you. They seem—”

“Involved. Yeah, they got that down.” His shoulders rose and fell in a jerky shrug as he sank back deeper into the chair. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to tear up that degree or anything. You’re right! You’re totally right, I’ve been getting a pretty regular stream of sad texts from them for the past week. They’ve _asked_ if I wanted to hang out. Some of them, anyway.”

Hill’s forehead wrinkled as he raised his eyebrows. “Yet you say you have no plans for the day.”

“I did say that, yeah.”

He drummed his fingers on the notepad set on the desk, each _thump_ of contact muted by the paper. Hill’s mouth pursed in the way it always did when he was carefully weighing his words. “You know, Josh, there is a very fine line between the peacefulness of solitude and the loneliness of isolation.”

“Thank you Alan, as always, that was very poetic, and only _kind of_ ominous.” Against his better judgment, he let his eyes fall onto the painting again, if only to avoid looking Hill dead-on. How _terrible_ that young woman in the front and center was. How _grotesque_. Some creeping whisper in the back of his mind wondered whether a human body _could_ look like that. Is that what you looked like when you starved to death? Could that sort of torment be _possible?_

Would that be what the remains looked like, when they were found under the permafrost?

“I’m not going to ask if you want my advice, Josh, because I know you don’t, but as your therapist I _am_ obligated to give it, either way. There is no shame in being sad in front of your friends. It doesn’t make you lesser in any way, it doesn’t make you _weaker_. Do you know why they’ve been reaching out to you?”

He wrenched his eyes away from the painting. “Mhm. They feel guilty.”

Frustration was one of the things Hill was best at masking. Even still, Josh could hear the sigh he breathed through his nose. “Doesn’t it strike you as equally likely that they’re genuinely concerned for you?” When he didn’t give an immediate answer, Hill folded his hands together in a familiar gesture. “Perhaps the world is not quite as self-absorbed as you think it is.”

“I think I got a pretty solid grasp of the situation. It’s fine. What good would it do, anyway? Sitting around singing kumbaya and all that shit, I mean. Doesn’t bring anyone back, doesn’t make anyone feel better, doesn’t _do_ anything, so…” Josh shrugged. “Can’t change the past, right? That’s what you’re always going on about. Can’t change it, so what’s the point?”

The clock, the one hidden in the office somewhere behind Josh’s head, continued to tick. It was the only real sound in the office for the better part of a minute, the time stretching the interval between each second into something thick—sticky. Hill appeared to be doing math in his head; the sort of math, Josh knew, that involved weighing the benefits of pressing him further on the twins. “All right,” he said after an eternity, “Has anything else come up since last week that you’d like to discuss with the time we have left?”

“Nope.”

“Does that mean you’re all right handing the reins over to me and my judgment?”

“By all means, swing away.” But that was a lie. A filthy fucking lie. Josh only distantly recognized that Hill was opening his mouth to say something before the words came tumbling out of his mouth. “Actually, uh, upon further introspection, I’m realizing maybe I _do_ have something I want to talk about.” He was sure that, had he looked up at him, there would’ve been abject shock written all over Hill’s face. _Josh Washington_ coming to a session with a topic in mind? Unheard of! Unthinkable! Unprecedented! But he _didn’t_ look at Hill, instead choosing to just…ride whatever wave this was.

Or, rather, he _would’ve_ ridden the wave, had his tongue not suddenly turned to a rock in his mouth.

He’d gone and opened the door, thrown it wide, but as he stood there on the threshold, realized his well of words had chosen that moment to run dry. He opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, inwardly cringing at the wet, uncertain sounds his lips made against his teeth.

True to form, Hill said nothing. He simply sat and watched from over the desk, his hands folded.

What he had thought was adrenaline balling in his chest became sharp and spiked and unmasked itself as something worse: Fear. Josh kept staring down at his hands in his lap, trying to untangle the mess of thoughts snaring his tongue back between his molars. He hadn’t planned on talking about this—not to Hill, not to _anyone_ —but lo and behold, like Poe and his loud-ass heart, here he was, tearing up the floorboards for all to see. “The girls…my sisters…they had these jewelry boxes, right?” He _did_ look up then, hands upturned on his knees as though in supplication. Just as quickly, he dropped his gaze again, not wanting to watch the way Hill’s face would change as he told his story. “They were a Christmas gift. From me. A-a few years back, 2010, I think. They weren’t anything special—I mean, they _were_. Special, that is, because both of them had wanted them—but they weren’t like, the big, fancy, pricey kind. Stupid, right? As if that shit matters. It does in _Chez Washington_ , but not the rest of the world. Or maybe it does, I don’t know. But they were the kind that had the little dancer inside, y’know? The ballerina that would spin?”

Hill nodded sagely (at least Josh _thought_ he did, from what little he could see in his periphery), remaining silent. Oh, what he would’ve done to have even the smallest window into what _he_ was thinking just then; likely he was applauding himself over reaching this would-be watershed moment, for finally chipping and chiseling his way to this emotional breakthrough. First he comes in with his own topic, and _then_ he starts tripping over his own words like a kid on the verge of tears? What a day! Nay, what a _month!_ What a _year!_ This would be the case study of his career: The Confounding Case of Joshua Washington and the Missing Sisters, a psychological intrigue in three parts.

“I know I’m…heh, I’m rambling.” Josh heaved a sigh, raking his fingers back through his hair. “Point is, Alan, they have these jewelry boxes. Or, shit, maybe they’re music boxes? Is there a difference? Fuck me if I know—but they _do_ play music. This old kid’s song, uh…” And though he knew it better than any of the current Top 20, he pretended he had to search for it, snapping his fingers a couple times, punctuating each click with an uncertain ‘uh.’ “ _Frère Jacques_ , that’s it!”

“A classic for music boxes, I’m sure."

“Yeah, what’s not to love, right? Well, uh, see, the thing is…” The angry ball rolling around his chest was spinning out of control, threatening to lodge itself into something fleshy and important. “The, uhhh…the thing _is_ , Alan,” he tried again, speaking more firmly, more deliberately. “I _feel like_ …fuck. I’m hearing this stupid goddamn song just…all the time.” He prayed that he didn’t look half so plaintive as he felt when he met Hill’s gaze. “It’s like… _everywhere_. Even though the boxes are in the lodge and they don’t exactly play nursery rhymes on the pop stations.”

“I don’t suppose they do. Not yet, anyway. In my personal opinion, it might be an improvement on what’s passing as music, these days…”

“Not a fan of Iggy Azalea, I take it?” He tried to curl his mouth into a smirk only to find his muscles rejecting the idea. “So, uh, not to put too fine a point on it, but am I uh…” He ground his back teeth from side to side. “Am I…going crazy? Or…craz _ier_ , I guess, since you’ve already got that fun manila folder back there to establish I’ve gone well and fully off the rails a few times already…”

He wanted it to be hard to decipher the way Hill was looking at him. Wasn’t that how it went in all the books—the mysterious psychologist giving his patient a mysterious look in a mysterious manner, impossible to parse and even more impossible to fully understand? Why _couldn’t_ it be like that? Why couldn’t it be like that even just once?

The look on Hill’s face was _not_ hard to decipher. It was pity, plain as day, and it made the spiked thing between his ribs give an unpleasant heave.

“What do I think, what do I think, what do I think…” Hill muttered to himself, twiddling his thumbs as he considered it. His face moved in the minute way that suggested he might’ve been chewing at the insides of his cheeks. “Hmm. Well. If you don’t have any objections, I think I’m going to answer your question with a story.”

“Figures.”

He hummed in quiet amusement, the corners of his mouth suggesting a smile. “When I was a boy, just a bit younger than you are now, if you can even imagine, my grandfather passed away very suddenly. And believe you me when I say I was… _distraught_. In all honesty, the word…well, it doesn’t even come close to describing it. We were very close, my grandfather and I, he was much more like a father to me, truly, so his loss hit me particularly hard.” He paused for a moment— _only_ a moment—and inclined his chin towards Josh. “As I’m sure you can understand.”

He could. He didn’t say as much, though, opting instead to pick at the band of his watch. Just because he thought he could see where the story was going meant very little. What mattered was where _Hill_ was going with it. Hill’s anecdotes were predictable; Hill, himself, was absolutely, positively _not_.

“For…what I would say was a _considerable_ amount of time, there would be these instances where I was just… _positive_ he was still there in our house with me.” His pensive expression flickered for a moment, another hint of a wary smile tugging at his lips. “Now, unlike you, I’ve never been much a fan of ghost stories. However…during that stretch of time after my grandfather’s death, I’m not ashamed to tell you that I began to understand exactly _how_ and _why_ we as a species began _telling_ them. I would walk into his old study and smell the smoke of his pipe, just…” Hill paused again, making a vague wafting motion in front of his face with his hand, “Fresh and _strong_ , as though he was still sitting in his chair. Or—you know that uncanny ability we have to simply _hear_ footsteps and _know_ which member of our family is walking by?—I would lie in bed at night, trying to fall asleep, and the stairs would creak in just the right way to suggest he was coming up for the night.” Nodding to himself, he folded his hands atop the desk and began to rhythmically tap his thumbs. “The most bizarre part of it, though, the part that made me wonder whether I was going well and truly mad, was that there would be these times where, from the corner of my eye, or just outside of my periphery, I would swear I _saw_ him. I’d walk through a crowd of people and have to turn back and check to reassure myself I _hadn’t_ just seen his face, or I’d be in a restaurant with some friends and think I’d spotted him at a nearby table.”

Uncharacteristically silent, Josh stared down at Hill’s hands as well, watching the gleam of his pinky ring. What caught him off his guard was how _comforting_ the story was proving to be. It was frank and personal and most shockingly of all, it was _relatable_. The angry ball in his chest shrank, if only a bit. He chewed at nothing in particular as he released the tension in his jaw, feeling it literally pop in relief. “So…what’s the prognosis, Doc? You _don’t_ think I’m losing my goddamn mind? Is that what I’m hearing?”

Hill smiled again, chuckling quietly. “Oh, on the contrary, Josh. I think we _all_ lose our minds when loved ones leave us. Only a bit. Only a touch.” He let the sentiment hang in the air (for dramatic effect, Josh suspected) before speaking again. “But am I concerned that you’re imagining you hear the song from your sisters’ music boxes from time to time? No, Josh, I’m not. Genuinely, given the circumstances surrounding the situation, I would be _quite_ surprised if you _weren’t_ experiencing anything like that. I wouldn't be surprised if you thought you were catching glimpses of them, on occasion.”

“I bet you say that to _all_ the basket cases, huh, Alan?” That time, the muscles of his face obeyed him, and when he grinned, it was genuine.

Though the smile remained, something in Hill’s eyes changed. Only for a second, only for a breath, but that was all it took. The old feeling of being reprimanded in the principal’s office returned in full swing, despite the fact that, for the life of him, Josh couldn’t figure out what had prompted it.

“You’re not a ‘basket case,’ Josh. I need you to understand that—and more precisely, I need you to _believe_ it. Grief can be a horrid, monstrous, _impossible_ thing, the stuff of nightmares. It is a terrible, hungry beast. Rarely sated, if ever, and it _can_ and _will_ devour its victims whole. _If_ they let it.” He spread his palms out, fingers still laced, in a poignant gesture. “There’s no shame in feeling the sting of its teeth. As for the manila envelope you so tactfully mentioned earlier…despite your own misgivings on the subject, ‘depression’ is not a dirty word. It can color our thoughts and behaviors, certainly, but it is an _illness_ , Josh, not an insult.”

His face felt tight as he lost the battle to keep his grin in place. It fell slowly, then violently, a house of cards brought tumbling down by a particularly well placed puff of breath.

“While we’re on the subject, I do have to ask how you’re doing with the Phenelzine. Still treating you well?”

“Yup.” His tongue was numb again.

“Thirty milligrams, three times a day, correct?”

“Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Three squares.”

It very well could have been his imagination, but Josh thought he could sense the barest suggestion of suspicion in the creases of Hill’s eyes. “All right,” he said, and was that doubt in his tone? “I’m glad to hear it! I will remind you though, it’s very important you continue taking what was prescribed, Josh. I believe I’ve already gone into the consequences of withdrawal from this particular medication…?” If he was surprised when Josh didn’t reply, he didn’t let on. “How about this—I want you to start keeping track of these… _moments_. When you’re hearing that music, or…” he shrugged, but his eyes still searched Josh’s face. “Anything similar. The time, the place, what you were doing right before. Consider it homework. Does that sound doable?”

From somewhere behind his head, a soft chime sounded.

“Mmm. It appears we’re out of time for today.”

***

**6:16pm**

“And we’re _sure_ this is a good idea?”

“Nope!” Sam all but flung the SUV’s side door open, letting it roll back before she hopped out, balancing a plate on one hand and a bowl in the other.

“Absolutely not,” Ashley agreed, using her foot to push the passenger door open. She shimmied her way out, arms similarly full, and used her hip to bump the door shut again.

Chris frowned as he jammed the gearshift into park. “Yet _apparently_ we agreed on bursting out of my car like the SWAT team, huh? Is that what we decided?” He shook his head and removed his keys, gathering up what was left before closing his and Sam’s doors, both of the girls already halfway up the walkway. “You guys are _real_ shit at the whole secret agent thing, if that’s what you were going for. You’re not supposed to follow each other, you’re supposed to slice the pie.”

“We didn’t _bring_ a pie!”

He sighed through his nose, having to settle for rolling his eyes instead of gesturing with his hands. “Uh huh. Okay. Great. _I_ thought it was funny…one day…one day I will be appreciated for the _genius_ that I am.”

Sam turned to look over her shoulder as he approached, raising her eyebrows in a wordless expression of affectionate exasperation. “Yeah, well, hey Mr. Genius, any chance you could ring the bell for us little ladies? Given our hands are full and all that.”

“Thank you, mighty benevolent ruler, for giving me some purpose in this life.” He leaned in and rang the bell with his free hand, the familiar three-chime tone audible even through the front door. “You want me to do it again, boss?” he asked Sam, adding a teasing waver to his voice. “Was that _good enough_ for you?”

“I dunno…could’ve put a _little_ more passion into it, but it’ll do, I _guess_.”

“Ha ha. You want passion, you gotta buy me dinner first.”

“ _Gross_.”

Chris whirled on her, craning his head to an almost comical angle. “Again? Again with this? What is so gross with—hey, you stop that.” Ashley was giggling away all the while, entirely unaffected by his admonishment. “Lots of people would _love_ me to give them my passion, Sam.”

“ _Double_ gross. No one wants your passion.”

“You’re hurtful, do you know that? You’re a hurtful, hateful person, and I’ll thank you to—”

It was at that moment that the front door swung open. Across the threshold, Josh froze, face going from neutral to deer-in-headlights to just plain _baffled_ as he took in what he was looking at. “Uh…is it safe to assume that you assholes aren’t here to deliver my pizza? Because, gotta be honest with you…I’m getting the _distinct_ sensation that you’re not here to deliver my pizza.”

“Oh man, you puzzle that one out on your own, champ?” Sam gave him a dramatic, simpering smile, puckering her lips jokingly as she shouldered past him into the house. “Putting this in the kitchen!” she called cheerily.

“Yeah, just traipse on in like some kind of animal, that’s fine. Hey, Giddings, _take off your shoes_ , I swear to God…” Josh turned as she walked by him, tracking her with his eyes until he couldn’t turn his head any further. He looked back to the front door where Chris and Ashley were seemingly arguing over which of them would squeeze past him next. “Hey, Mulder, Scully, if you don’t mind?”

They both looked up, nearly in unison, and he watched as twin looks of confusion bloomed across their faces.

With the cool acceptance of a parent who has grown to accept their children are morons, he clucked his tongue. “Either come into the house, or take a couple steps to the side so the nice lady can get through.”

“The nice…?” Ashley was the first to turn, letting out an embarrassed squeak when she spotted the person who was _actually_ there to deliver Josh’s pizza. “Oh gosh, sorry!” She scurried back to make some room, beating a hasty retreat.

Startled, Chris stepped back as well, but not before a nervous bark of laughter escaped him. “Shit! Didn’t even hear you drive up! God that’s…that’s a quiet car!”

Underneath the brim of her logoed cap, the pizza girl looked from Ashley (loaded down with a casserole dish balanced on one hand and a plastic grocery bag hanging from the other) to Josh (arms folded and eyebrows raised) to Chris (cradling a large paper bag in the crook of his arm like a baby), very obviously trying and failing to figure them out in her head. She seemed to think better of it, hefting up the heat-retaining bag she had. “I guess so. Sign this?”

“Ayup, gotcha there.” Josh took the receipt from her and quickly dashed off his signature, using Chris’s shoulder as a writing surface. He flashed her what was probably meant to be a winning smile as he handed it back, but it was clear at once that she was less than entertained by them.

She gave Josh the pizza and shot the group of them one last, uncertain look before setting her mouth in a line (the expression positively _screaming_ ‘Oh, what _ever_ ’) before briskly walking back to her car.

“We’re so charming,” Josh sighed airily. He took one great step back, clearing the doorway for them. “Come on, I’m sure Sammy’s already halfway done unpacking.” Once they’d shuffled into the house, toeing out of their shoes as gracefully as they could, given how weighted down with shit they were, he raised his voice for Sam to hear. “You know, I _told_ you fucks that I was busy tonight.”

“Mhm,” Sam hummed, appearing from out of the kitchen to grab the pizza box from Josh. She promptly offloaded it onto Chris, cracking open a soda for herself as she stood in the foyer with him. “You did. In fact…” she waited until both Chris and Ashley had disappeared into the kitchen to more fully turn her attention to Josh. “Yooooou said you had family stuff planned.”

“And you just, what, assumed I was lying? Decided to come crashing in?” Setting his hands on his hips, he bent down slightly—just enough to be eye-level with her. “Not very neighborly of you, Sammy, gotta say.”

“Oh no, we wanted to  _guarantee_ you weren’t lying.”

He paused, a crease appearing between his eyebrows as he tried to make any sort of sense out of what she’d said. “Uh…” he spread his arms wide before letting them drop down to his sides again. “I dunno about you, but I sure as _fuck_ don’t see any family here.”

She lifted her eyes to him, pressing her lips together and shrugging before taking a sip of her soda. “Then maybe you need to look a little closer.”

Josh opened his mouth to respond to _that_ , only to find (not for the first time that day) he had nothing.

Sam rolled her eyes good-naturedly, offering him a secretive half-smile. “C’mon,” she said, nodding towards the kitchen. “Pizza’s gonna get cold.” She held her hand out, the one not holding the soda can, and squeezed it hard when he took it in his.

***

**8:30pm**

Thankfully, the pizza did _not_ go cold. It would’ve been a tragedy, really, given how upsettingly glue-like the cheese in stuffed crust tended to get when it was lukewarm. No, it was polished off fairly quickly, along with an impressive spread that could’ve _only_ come from the Hartleys. It certainly hadn’t been as much food as they’d gotten for Ashley’s grad party, but it felt close enough by the time they’d eaten their fill, hardly any space in the kitchen _not_ covered by wadded up tinfoil or plastic wrap or empty aluminum cans.

They’d been sprawled out in the living room for a good while, taking up the spots on the couches and floor they’d been growing used to over the course of the summer. And as was the mark of _any_ Josh-Wash production, there was a pile of phones on the coffee table.

“That’s sick. You’re sick.”

“Oh my _God!_ You asked me, I just _told_ you!”

“I-I-I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at you the same way again Ash, honestly. No, honestly, I don’t.” Chris held an arm up to protect himself as Ashley swung a decorative throw pillow at him. She still managed to knock his glasses askew, much to Sam and Josh’s delight.

Ashley righed herself, smoothing her shirt back out with a laugh. “I hate this game,” she said, though her ear-to-ear grin said otherwise. “Ummm…okay, okay, I got one. Josh. If…okay, if we were all in a burning building and you could _only_ save two of us, who would you save?”

The room filled with the haunting ‘OoOoOoOoOh!’ chorus that always seemed to follow a good question.

“Man, are you _trying_ to set yourself up to get your feelings hurt here, Ash?” Josh asked, pressing the tip of his tongue to an incisor.

She smirked back at him defiantly. “I just wanna hear you _say_ it.”

“Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh…well…” He shrugged his shoulders helplessly, pretending to size each of them up, one by one. “Hate to shock you here, kiddo, _but_.” One of his eyebrows lifted slyly. “So the house is on fire, right? Burning down, just like that old song. I can only save two of you shmucks—only got two arms, after all—who do I save? Easy. I save _your_ ass, and I save _Cochise’s_ ass, because you two couldn’t save yourselves if your lives depended on it. _Literally_. You both freeze up, I’ve seen it. I’ve _seen_ it!” He laughed, similarly raising his arms up in an X to protect his face when Ashley threw the pillow at him.

From where she sat on the floor, Sam stared, open-mouthed. “You would _leave me_ in the house?!”

“I would.”

“ _Rude!_ ”

“No, nonono, it’s not. Clearly you weren’t _listening_ to me, Sammy.” He reached over to her and pulled her close into a jokingly tight hug, making a show of setting his chin atop her head and stroking her hair messily. “I _believe_ in you! I have _faith_ in you! _You_ would find your own way out of the building, unscathed. Unharmed. I know that shit in my heart of hearts and soul of souls. Those two?” He pointed to Chris and Ashley, knowing full well she wouldn’t be able to turn to see them, given how he was restraining her. “They’re fucked. They’re dead meat. Fried extra crispy. This is an insult to _them_ , not to _you_.”

She laughed, doing her best to wriggle out of his grasp, pushing herself away fully only after he pantomimed planting a loud, smacking kiss to the top of her head. “Real nice. _Real_ nice.”

“Fuck you, man. I could’ve saved myself.”

“Ah yeah, Cochise? You want me to change my answer? You want me to leave _you_ in the fire? I could do that. I could absolutely do that in this hypothetical. Good luck getting out, my man. I saw how you handled the obstacle courses in gym.”

“This is what I get, huh? This is what I get for being a good friend?”

Josh raised his arms high, waving for all of them to quiet down. “ _My_ turn.” He clapped his hands together once, steepling his fingers menacingly under his chin. “It occurs to me that our resident fire-survivor hasn’t gone in a while.”

“I don’t _need_ to,” Sam assured him. “You can absolutely keep picking on Chris—I will _not_ stop you.”

He shook his head apologetically, leaning back where he sat. “I gotta task for you, dear Samantha.”

“Great.”

Josh considered it for a second or two longer before nodding to himself. “For the class, if you would, describe your sex life using _only_ baseball metaphors.”

“Hey Josh?”

“Yeah?”

“What the _actual_ fuck does that mean?” Sam laughed along with the rest of them, turning to Chris and Ashley while pointing a finger towards Josh. “Do _you_ have any idea what he’s talking about? What does that _mean?_ Is that like…first base, second base stuff? What _is_ this?”

It was obvious at once that Ashley wasn’t going to be any help; she giggled and shook her head, shoulders up near her ears. Chris, on the other hand, assumed the posture of a college professor mid-lecture, despite his own snickering. “It _means_ you need to _answer_ , Sam.”

“But I don’t _get_ it!”

“Just answer it however _you_ interpret it!”

“ _Or_ you could give me your phone…”

“Fine, fine! God, you guys are so weird! Why can’t you just give _normal_ dares?! Like drinking hot sauce. Or taking your clothes off. Sheesh.” Sam’s eyes rolled to the ceiling while she tried to piece together some sort of answer that could even _qualify_ as a baseball metaphor, lower teeth bared in a pained grimace. “I…okay. Okay, uh, how’s this? I am…a pinch hitter.” Proudly, she sat back, flipping her ponytail over her shoulder with a flourish. “There.”

There was silence. A lot of silence.

“H…how, exactly?” Josh asked, narrowing his eyes in interest. The look on his face could _only_ be described as _stupefied_. “No follow-ups, yeah, I know, but Sammy I don’t think that means…please explain.”

Groaning, she threw her hands up. “You _told_ me to answer it how I interpreted it!”

“No, I mean…Sam. Tell me what you think a pinch hitter does. This is. This is unbelievably important.”

With a sigh, she turned back to him. “I’ll go to bat for whatever team needs me?”

Another bout of silence.

Josh dropped his face into his hands. When he spoke up again, his voice was muffled by his palms. “Sam. Sammy. Samantha. That’s…I mean, thanks for sharing, truly, but as your friend, it is… _exceedingly_ important to me that you understand that’s…that’s not what pinch hitters do.”

It was _her_ turn to frown. “It’s…not?”

“No, Sam. No.”

She looked back to Chris and Ashley plaintively, and only saw more confusion there. “Then…wait, then what do they _do?_ ”

A warbling, pained sound escaped Josh as he dropped himself flat onto the floor, lying on his back, staring up to the ceiling. “No. There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to explain sports to _any_ of you. Just. Just leave me here to suffer. It’s fine. This is what I deserve. This is eons of karmic retribution for shit I’ve done in my past lives—friends who know jackshit about movies, and friends who know jackshit about baseball.”

“Don’t you think you’re being dramatic?”

“ _It’s the Great American Pastime, Samantha!_ ”

That inspired another jag of laughter from them all, driven mostly by the way Josh’s voice had cracked as he yelled it.

It was a nice feeling, sitting there laughing in the air-conditioning, poorly portioned mixed drinks sweating through their plastic cups onto the coffee table’s coasters. It was a nice moment, and comfortable, and _safe_ , and that was why Sam felt a jab of uncertainty about what she’d had planned. But the night wasn’t _just_ about Josh, she knew, nor was it _just_ about the twins. It was about _all_ of the Washington siblings, and…shit, maybe it was about _her_ , too. Was that selfish?

The laughter died down, as laughter tends to do, and when everyone’s attention had shifted back to her, Sam cleared her throat. “My turn, huh? Well. Okay, so I have…I have a thing. It’s not totally a dare, I guess, and it’s for _everyone_ , not only one person…so it’s unconventional, I guess, but I’m still ninety percent sure you guys make up the rules as you go along so…” Before she could think her way out of it (before she could see how _any_ of the others were looking at her), she grabbed her Solo cup from the table, half-lifting it into the air. “Everyone’s gotta make a toast to something.” Swallowing hard around the lump in her throat, she continued. “I’m not going to tell you _what_ , and I’m not even going to say it has to follow a theme. It doesn’t have to do with…anything. Just gotta make one, okay?” She was painfully aware of how quiet the room had grown now that the echoes of their laughter had receded up the stairs. “I’ll even go first. So…” she cleared her throat again. “Here’s to the important people in our lives that we’ve lost, and the important people in our lives that we found along the way.” It had sounded better in her head.

For a while, there was nothing, convincing her that it had been the _worst_ idea she’d ever cooked up.

Then there was a quiet sound from the couch. Ashley slid down onto the floor, folding her legs while she sussed out which of the unmarked cups had been hers. She lifted it as Sam had, miraculously managing to keep her head up and chin high. “To…learning from mistakes and not taking people for granted.”

Another groan from the couch when Chris joined them on the ground. He tipped his cup up, pointedly avoiding making eye contact with anyone. “To more fun nights, bad jokes, good laughs, and getting Sam to actually _watch_ a baseball game.”

Which left Josh. Of course.

His hand found his cup easily enough, plucking it up from the coaster it had been soaking through. He sloshed its contents around, staring down into it wordlessly. Only slowly did he raise it along the rest of theirs, but it was a deliberate breed of slowness, not a hesitant one. “And here’s to family,” he said, using the firm, self-assured voice he typically reserved for class presentations. “The blood kind _and_ the other kind.” He went to be the first to knock their cups together, but stopped, brow furrowing thoughtfully. “ _And_ ,” Josh continued, taking a deep, rib-shaking breath. “To Beth and Hannah. Who were _both_.”

They could all drink to that.

Another silence fell over them once they had finished their drinks, but a _new_ silence. Not tense, not fraught with discomfort or anxiety…but not wholly _peaceful_ , either. Sad, but not despondent. Understanding, perhaps. The wash of relief that comes after the worst bout of pain.

“Well,” Josh said, shattering whatever it was when it became too much. “Before this turns into an episode of Dr. Phil…I need a top-off. Anyone else?” There were a few mumbles that amounted to a general consensus of ‘no,’ and he pushed himself up from the floor with a grunt. “Suit yourselves.” He made it halfway there before an idea struck him. “Heyo, Ash! Get your ass over here. You and me are due to have a talk, I think.”

He could _feel_ her go rigid, even without turning to look. Still, the tiny sound of footsteps approached him from behind.

When he _did_ turn to look at her, Josh couldn’t help but laugh. “Jesus Christ, what, do I look like the big bad wolf or something? I’m not gonna fuckin’ bite your head off or anything. And don’t worry, this isn’t a…” he rolled his eyes, “This isn’t an emotion-thing. Already did that. Just wanna have a quick jibber-jab about creative struggles.”

At that, her low-grade panic morphed into low-grade doubt. “ _‘Creative struggles’?_ What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

He held an arm out like a proper gentleman, nodding downwards to prompt her. Josh watched as her eyes flickered from his face, down, and back again, and was more than slightly delighted when she played along, looping her arm through his. “Good, now that we can slip away from the Dumb Blonds…” he lowered his voice an octave, speaking through a corner of his mouth sneakily. “How good are you at keeping secrets?”

She thought it over for a moment, following him into the kitchen before unlinking their arms. “Depends on the secret. How juicy is it?”

“Like… _super_ juicy. The juiciest. Imagine biting into a _ridiculously_ juicy pear—juicier than _that_.” The two-liter hissed when he uncapped it, refilling his cup. “Think you could keep a secret like that to yourself?”

Ashley shrugged and hopped up onto one of the kitchen stools, letting her feel kick lazily in mid-air. She looked down into the pizza box as though contemplating whether or not to eat one of the forgotten pieces of pepperoni. “I could _try_.”

“Well, that’s good enough for me.” Taking the stool directly across from hers, Josh set his cup down and assumed a posture that wasn’t _entirely_ unlike Hill’s. “I need your help with something.”

The doubt was back in her expression. It was a look he’d seen on her many, many times before. _Countless_ times before, really. It was the look of someone who suspected a mean joke was about to be played on them. There was a pang somewhere deep in his gut when he realized, belatedly, that it was the sort of expression he’d seen on _Hannah’s_ face with an uncomfortable regularity.

Oh, _that_ thought had to fuck off _real_ quick.

He laughed, shaking his head and rocking backwards. “ _Wow_ , cold as _ice!_ What have I ever done to you to make you distrust me so?”

Ashley rolled her eyes in response, leaning her cheek against one of her hands. “Since when do _you_ come to _me_ for _help?_ ” She eyed him warily again, but it was clearly more for show than the reflection of any real suspicion. “Normally people only ask me for help if they have an essay that needs written or a group project they don’t want to do any work on.”

“As the resident dropout, I can assure you that there are _no_ poster projects I need you to make for me. Try not to be _too_ disappointed—I know how much you _love_ putting together Works Cited pages.” She stuck her tongue out at him and he returned the gesture. “Okay, in all seriousness, I, uh…I need some advice. _Writing_ advice.”

“I’m…I’m sorry, you’re gonna need to repeat that one for me. You need…”

“Writing advice, yes. Are you going to make me _beg?_ ”

“No! I’m just…what are you writing?” Absolutely beaming from ear-to-ear, she scooted her stool closer to the table, bringing her other hand up to her face to cradle her chin between her palms. “Is it gross?”

“If all goes according to plan,” he answered flatly. “Right now, the only gross part about it is…actually trying to _write_ it.”

“Preaching to the choir! But like… _what_ is it?”

He’d been halfway through taking a drink when she asked the question, and he paused, shooting her a long-suffering stare from over the rim of his cup. “Why don’t you take a wild fuckin’ stab in the dark, Encyclopedia Brown?”

She pooched her lower lip out in a pout, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling. “Is it…hmm…oh this is _hard_ …” Ashley joked. “You finally sitting down to crank out that _perfect_ horror movie you’re always babbling about?”

“First of all, I don’t _babble_.”

“You babble a _little_ bit.”

“Secondly, yes. Yes I am, as a matter of fact.”

If it was possible for her eyes to light up more than they already had, Josh would’ve been shocked. “ _Ahhhh_ , that’s so exciting! What do you need _my_ help for? _You’re_ the horror king. Or like…horror prince, born _of_ the horror king.”

There was a weird moment where…huh. He hadn’t expected that. Something about the mention of Bob’s horror prowess, vague though it was, had sent a gnarly wave of discomfort creeping down his spine. Chomping-down-on-tinfoil-with-fillings discomfort. Scratching-your-nails-down-a-chalkboard discomfort. That was…that was something he’d have to unpack later. For the time being, he returned her grin and shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t worry, I don’t need help with the spooky shit.”

“Oh thank God.”

“It’s the actual _writing_ that’s getting me.”

“Yeah…yeah, it sucks, huh? That’s what’ll getcha.” One of her eyebrows quirked, a significant look passing across her features. “Do I get to read some of it?”

“No. No, no, no.”

“ _Josh!_ ”

“Hell. No. Not yet. Slow your roll.”

“Fine, fine! I get it. But I’m gonna read it _eventually_ , right?”

“Ash.” He reached out across the table, wiggling his fingers until she dropped her hands into his. “This is coming from a place of love. You don’t do well with horror. You will _never_ read my script.”

She yanked her hands back out of his with an indignant sound. “I can _read_ horror! It’s just _watching_ it that’s bad!”

“Uh huh.”

“I _can!_ I’ve read lots of scary stuff!”

“Sure you have.”

“I read _Pet Sematary_ when I was like…thirteen!”

“And how many nightmares have you had about it since?” Her scowl was all the response he needed. “Look, don’t get pissy with me about that until I actually _have_ a project to actively hide from you, okay? I come to you on bended knee. You’ve been writing shit since we met. Was most of it _Harry Potter_ fanfiction? Sure. But—”

Ashley’s scowl deepened, and though Josh reached for her hands again, she folded her arms tightly across her chest in a show of rejection. “It was _not_.”

“You were one of five people on Earth who _actually_ wanted Ron and Hermione to end up together, it’s _fine_. Deviantart _needed_ you, Ash.”

“Literally shut up. Oh my God. I hate you so much.”

“Fanfiction.net?”

“Do you think I won’t get up and leave? I can get up and leave, Josh. I can go back into the living room, turn on the Food Network, and watch Chris do his _awful_ Guy Fieri impression. I don’t have to subject myself to this.”

“I think we _both_ know his Guy Fieri impression is _much_ worse than _anything_ I could say or do to you, Ashley Brown.”

There was a pause as she held his gaze defiantly. Then, slowly, she reached for a new plastic cup, pouring herself a drink from the two-liter. “Fair.”

Josh snickered mostly to himself. After Sam’s impromptu toast, kidding around felt like aloe on sun poisoning—sure, it didn’t _get rid_ of the ache, but it lessened it. He continued to hold his hands on the table, palms up and desperate. “So here’s my issue. I’m getting like…short bursts where I can write maybe a page. And then it’s just… _poof!_ Gone. Sayonara. For days, or weeks, even. It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting down to try at night or in the morning or after I eat or before I eat or _any_ of that. It’s just…it’s there or it isn’t, if that makes sense? And then when it _is_ there, it’s just…so slow.”

She nodded empathetically as she heard him out, absently swirling her soda around in her cup. “ _The worst_.”

“I keep hopping around, too, which…I mean when you have a scene in your head, a _really_ good one, you gotta get that shit down while the getting’s good, don’t you?”

“Oh, I do,” she said, her nodding becoming more fervent. “I bounce around all the time. I can’t _do_ stuff chronologically, it’s like…impossible for me. But those connecty bits between the scenes will _kill_ you.”

“Yeah! And I can’t keep my focus on any one thing at once, you know? I keep having to go back and forth, back and forth, because I can’t figure out what camera angle I want where, or I can’t remember if I’m in a close-up or a wide-shot, and—”

“Wait. Whoa, whoa. Whoa. Hang on.” Ashley lifted one of her hands, face scrunched up in disbelief. “You’re writing, like, _screen direction_ in this?”

“Uh…yeah? That’s how it’s done? It’s not like I’m writing a _novel_ , it’s gonna be a _movie_ , so—”

“Well, there’s problem number one, Josh! This is your first draft—you can’t be sitting around hemming and hawing over things like what angle the camera’s going to be at for each scene, holy cow! You’ll never finish! Why don’t you try writing it like…just _writing_ it? Like a novel. Or a short story. I mean, usually stories get _adapted_ into screenplays, don’t they? You gotta focus on the story first, _then_ you go and spend hours of every day daydreaming about camera angles.”

He blinked. “Oh. I…huh. That…actually makes…sense.”

“Wow, don’t say it like you’re _surprised_.” She took a petulant drink. “ _You_ came to _me_ , after all.”

Josh only half-heard her, already doing the mental calisthenics required to imagine reformatting what he already had into something more of a narrative. It could work. He’d probably only have to rework a _few_ things, incorporate what direction he had into basic descriptions of the settings…shit. Shit, it really, genuinely _could_ work. “Goddamn. Ash, I won’t, because I’m not totally sure either of us would be into it, but I could _kiss_ you right now.”

“You sure know how to make a girl feel special.”

He laughed, reaching up and futzing with his hair as he continued to think, brain twisting and turning in ways he hadn’t anticipated. “Uh…shit, okay. Just one more question, I guess, and then I’m gonna have to stew on all this. How do you come up with characters? When you’re _not_ writing about Ron and Hermione getting steamy in the forbidden section of the library, that is. I know how you got _them_.”

“I hate you _so_ much.”

“You don’t.”

“You’re gonna think I’m crazy for what I’m gonna say for this one, but…sometimes…” she waved her hand around in the air, tightening her mouth as she considered her phrasing. “You just have to base them on people you know.”

His eyebrows shot up. “You telling me you’ve been writing about me? Is that what this is? Am I the dark, brooding star of some Elizabethan romance scandal?”

“ _Hardly_. I mean, like…okay, this is gonna sound extremely bizarre. But have you kind of noticed that like…I don’t know, the older you get, when you meet new people, sometimes you don’t think of them so much as their own, unique, individual person so much as you think ‘Oh man, they remind me of Kim,’ or like ‘They laugh _just like_ Amanda,’ or ‘Liam talks exactly like that’? Sort of like, the more people you meet, the more you see them as little pieces-parts of people you already know? You at least _relate_ them to each other…you can do that with characters, too. Just take pieces-parts of people you know, throw them together with other ones, and…voilà!” She made twin starbursts with her fingers. “There they are.”

“Yeah, I dunno how I feel about _that_ piece of advice, actually.” He did actually know how he felt about it. He couldn’t help but think back to the pile of crumpled character sketches currently overflowing the trashcan in his room; how all of them, _all_ of them, turned out to be more than just pieces-parts of people he already knew. He wondered if Ashley would still be giving him that advice if she knew precisely how many of those sketches looked like _her_. “I’ve been trying to start out with just basic archetypes and then figured I’d fill in the blanks later. Dialogue’s kind of slow-going that way, but what can you do?”

Ashley made a surprisingly loud, surprisingly _scandalized_ sound, frowning with an intensity most people saved for only the worst of personal affronts. “Well, _that’s_ your problem, dumdum! You can’t just write, like… _random_ stuff. Pulling crap out of thin air? It’s not gonna work, it’s not gonna _flow!_ You have to write what you _know_. Things that are relevant to _you_ , things that you already get. I mean…” She paused for a moment, bobbling her head from side to side as she tried to find an example. “Look at Stephen King!”

“I’d rather not.”

“Oh, ha ha ha. No, like…in almost _all_ of his stuff, the main character, or at least one of the main characters, is…” Ashley held a hand out, prompting him to complete the sentence.

He pretended to mull it over. “A guy.”

“Well…yeah, but—”

“Pretentious.”

“No. I mean—Josh.”

“Sexy as _fuck_. _Always_ getting laid.”

“They’re writers, Josh. They’re _writers_. Usually writers who are struggling to get a book written.” Still, she rolled her eyes and laughed, shaking her head slowly. “If you write about stuff that you already know, people, places, things…they’re gonna feel more _real_. The realer it feels? The more genuine and like, I don’t know, _earnest_ it seems? The more people are gonna get hooked on it, because _they’re_ going to relate to it more, too.” That time, _she_ reached across the table, grabbing one of his arms. “Why don’t you just _try_ basing your characters on people _at first?_ Use them as placeholders! Or at least, I dunno, scaffolding, if that makes sense? Then, once you figure out the story more, _then_ you switch them around a little, or reshape them. If nothing else, it might help you plan things, or see what you do and don’t like for the character dynamics.”

Feigning a bitter pout, he eyed her flatly. “You _do_ realize that if I do that and it _works_ …I will _never, ever_ tell you.”

She nodded, taking a drink. “Oh, I know.”

“You would be _insufferable_.”

“I would not!”

“Mhm.” Heaving a maudlin breath, Josh flopped himself over, setting his chin on the table. “If I had known you’d be such a well of knowledge, I woulda asked _weeks_ ago. Coulda saved myself a shitton of suffering, huh?

“Live and learn, right?” She smiled up at him, patting the top of his head.

He returned the smile. “Live and learn.”

 

***

**11:11pm**

She hadn’t planned on it.

It was a stupid thing to think, but it was the only thing that kept popping to the surface of her brain: This wasn’t what she had _planned_.

No, she had _planned_ to show up, to sail through the night, to maybe get a little sad, to go back home and cry it out in the shower, if needed. More to the point, when the guys had suggested moving to the backyard and starting a fire, well shit, she had _planned_ on finishing her drink and joining them in getting it going. Maybe even dipping her feet in the pool if the kindling took too long to catch.

So then why—why in _God’s_ name—was she still sitting at the kitchen table? Why did her thighs feel like they were made out of cement, weighing her down? Why hadn’t she moved her hand to bring the cup to her mouth? Why was she sitting there, alone, listening to the incessant hum of the lights in their overhead recesses instead of cracking jokes and palling around with the others? Why was she there _at all?_

There was a soft, uninteresting sound to her left as a stool was pulled away from the table, followed by another rustle as someone sat. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

Ashley sat mostly hunched, her arms folded on the table, chin resting atop them, watching Sam with a serene kind of understanding. A full minute passed like that, with her sitting silently, eyes moving slowly between Sam’s profile and the condensation collecting on the plastic of her cup. When she finally spoke up, she kept her voice low. “How’re you doing?”

“Oh, you know…” Sam tightened her mouth until it very nearly resembled a smile. The tingling in her nose chose that moment to give way into the inevitable, turning her vision warningly blurry. She turned, meeting Ashley’s gaze with a shrug just as the first fat tear fell, adding to the ring collecting on the table. “About as well as expected,” she managed through a watery laugh, rolling her eyes at herself. “Well. Not _exactly_ as expected, I guess.”

The stool made a hollow sound as Ashley scooted closer, setting her head against Sam’s arm. “Would it be stupid of me to ask if you were okay? I feel like I already know the answer, but it sorta feels like the thing to ask.”

Another taut laugh at that, and Sam shook her head. “I’m okay—really, I am. I _am._ It’s, um…” She quickly swiped away the wetness gathering at the corners of her eyes, sniffling once, abruptly. “It’s just _strange_ , y’know? Being here? For this.” Her nose wrinkled with another quiet snuffle. “I’ve been in this house like a _million_ times. I’ve sat in _this_ exact chair a million times. Sometimes, even for—” Sam shook her head again, suddenly finding herself able to use the muscles in her arms. Reaching up, she smoothed the sides of her hair back, tucking a few errant strands behind her ears; at the movement, Ashley sat up straighter, angling herself to better face her, and Sam couldn’t tell whether or not she regretted it.

“Birthdays.” In true Ashley fashion, she’d solved the mystery of _that_ particular unfinished sentence.

“Yeah,” Sam sighed. “ _Yeah_.” Through her shirt, she felt the warmth of a hand on her back, smack-dab in the spot between the shoulder blades reserved for consolation, and she knew she was done for. It wasn’t that she was _embarrassed_ to cry in front of other people, nor did she find any shame in it. The fact of the matter was, it always seemed to feel like an _inconvenience_ , some burden she was laying on someone else’s shoulders. When you cried in front of someone, you were essentially sending out an APB for sympathy. ‘Comfort me,’ public crying said, ‘Make _me_ feel better.’ And she _hated_ that feeling, hated that deeply rooted suspicion that she was reliant on someone else to be the rock. _She_ was supposed to be the rock, _she_ was supposed to be the support beam, _she_ was supposed to be the one who had it all figured out and all under control, no worries there good buddy, no how, no way.

Ashley cast a quick look over her shoulder, ensuring that the guys were still nowhere to be seen before she turned back to Sam. As something of a _professional_ public crier, there were few things she knew so well as the distinct sort of discomfort that came with being unexpectedly walked in on in the middle of an emotional moment. She began rubbing slow circles on her back, stopping onto when Sam leaned over to drop her head onto Ashley’s shoulder.

“It’s gonna get easier—I _know_ that. Logically? Rationally? Yeah, I know it’s gonna get easier, but _man_ , I just…didn’t expect it to be _this_ hard, tonight.” With her arm, she rubbed at her face, groaning and pulling away as she remembered her eye makeup. “Ugh. I’m tired, Ash.”

“I know, Sam.”

Huffing a curt breath through her nose, Sam did her best to sniffle away what she could. “I just miss ‘em.”

“I know.”

She looked up to Ashley, turning a corner of her mouth upwards before twiddling her fingers up towards her own face. “Give it to me straight. What’s the damage?”

“Eh, you’re a little runny. No one else is gonna notice, though.” Rolling the sleeve of her hoodie up over the heel of her hand, she wiped away the worst of the tear tracks, sitting back to examine her face better. “All clear.”

“Phew. Close one, huh?” Sam rocked back into her own space, resting her weight on her elbows.

“Super close. Like…incredibly close. You know how observant those two are, they would’ve been _allllll_ over that.” Ashley smiled when Sam snickered, but nudged her lightly with her shoulder. “You wanna talk about it, though? Any of it? Even if it’s just a little snippet?”

Normally she probably would’ve—fuck that. There was nothing _normal_ about any of this. There was nothing _normal_ about having to celebrate your best friends’ birthday without them there. Normal had long-since flown out the window. Normal was dead and buried, baby. Normal was one of those words you said one time too many and it stopped sounding real. Sam nodded, feeling that she’d already purged what had needed to come out. “Yeah. It’s the tiny stuff that gets you…people don’t ever expect that. Everyone always thinks when you lose someone, it’s gonna be the _big_ crap that catches you off-guard, but it’s not. It’s stuff like…” she angled herself in her seat, pointing to the other stools. “I _always_ sat here. And Beth _always_ sat in that one,” she pointed, “And Hannah _always_ sat where you are.”

Ashley glanced down at her stool, unable to help but feel as though she’d disturbed some sacred place.

“I keep expecting them to come down the stairs, or something. Earlier, when I went to get ice? I realized they got rid of the box of Popsicles Beth always had, just in case she really wanted something grapey. When I came in, I didn’t see their shoes on the matt, and even though I _know_ how long it’s been, and I’ve had all this time to adjust, the _first_ thought I had—and I mean the _first_ one, Ash, just…” she snapped her fingers, “Instant, unconscious stuff, was ‘Wait, are they not home?’” She let out a tired laugh, shaking her head. “ _Then_ it all comes back. Like when you wake up in the morning and totally forget who you are for a couple seconds, and then you remember it’s Monday and you’re late for class.” The second laugh came more naturally. Sam swiped at her cheeks again, if only for good measure. “But I’m okay. I’m a little sad tonight, and I’ll probably still be a little sad tomorrow, but…I’m okay.” She reached over and set her hand on Ashley’s, patting it lightly. “Thanks for checking in.”

“Any time.” She flipped her hand over and set the other one on top, sandwiching Sam’s hand between both of hers.

The sliding door to the backyard must’ve been off of its track, because it absolutely _shrieked_ in protest when it was thrown open. Both of them jumped at the sound, whirling around just in time to see Josh in the doorway of the kitchen. “I—” his voice had started out strong, but it chipped like ice as he froze, looking at _something_ just beyond the two of them.

Ever watchful, Ashley twisted back around in her seat, facing the way she had been before Josh had stormed in. She glanced around the kitchen, even craning her head to peer into the living room beyond, seeing…nothing. Nothing at all.

“You okay?” Sam asked, spine straightening in response to the shock on his face. “Something wrong?”

He seemed to come back to himself a second later, shaking his head. “Nah, sorry, I…shit, I thought I saw something.” Josh’s face tightened as he leaned to one side, craning his head as Ashley had a moment ago. “Like, uh, a spider or something, I guess.” When he looked back down to them, he was himself again. “I thought you were getting the s’mores shit? Is this what s’mores shit looks like, Miss Brown?”

“I _was!_ Sam and I were just having a quick conversation—”

“Aw man, aw man…you guys talking about cute boys without me?” Josh asked, melodramatically dropping into one of the vacant stools. (But not, Ashley noticed, the one Sam had pointed out as _Beth’s._ ) He crossed one leg over the other, bouncing his foot up and down expectantly. “Well? _Dish_.”

Ashley rolled her eyes, reaching over and shoving Sam playfully when she laughed at him. “Is that what you think? That girls just sit around and talk about cute boys all the time? That’s not even close to what we were doing.”

“Oh no?”

“No. And even if we _were_ , I wouldn’t tell _you_ about it, bigmouth.” With a flourish, she stood from her stool, grabbing the grocery bag with s’mores supplies up off the counter.

Sam leaned into the space where Ashley had been sitting, the spot that had once been Hannah’s, lowering her voice until she could only _just_ be heard by her. “ _I’d_ tell you,” she reassured Josh, nodding conspiratorially.

He grinned wolfishly, shoulders bouncing with quiet laughter. “Well I should _hope so_ , Sammy.”

There was another awful squeal from the sliding door as Chris appeared, halfway in and halfway out of the house. “The fuck, guys? Fire’s ready to go! What’re we doing, talking about cute boys?!”

“Why is it always cute boys with you two?” Ashley struggled with the sliding door, settling on squeezing around Chris.

“Who doesn’t love cute boys?”

It only took them a few minutes to get comfortably situated around the fire, close enough to toast their marshmallows but distant enough to keep from dying of heat. The embers that spit and crackled off of the wood drifted upwards into the sky, joining the stars in a sight that was more than slightly poetic. Ashley’s prediction had come to fruition, as it turned out, and neither Josh nor Chris seemed to have noticed anything off about Sam (if they _had_ , they certainly didn’t _say_ ). Even so, a lull came over them once the box of graham crackers had made its first full round.

“Know what we need?” Chris was the first to break the silence, as was so often the case. “It’s dark, it’s late, how about some campfire stories, huh?”

Sam smiled, hugging her knees to her chest as she let her head crane back to stare at the stars. “Just nothing _creepy_ , okay? Too close to bedtime for me.”

“Welp, if creepy’s off the menu, then I think we’re gonna have to rely on Ash for a scintillating tale.” Josh turned to her, quirking an eyebrow knowingly. “So…any tales you want to spin for us, Miss Brown? Maybe something about the library wing? Or an _unconventional_ poti—” A jumbo-sized marshmallow bounced off of his forehead, leaving a tiny, powdery mark between his eyes. “Wow.”

“Nu-uh, not me. I’m a written word girl, myself. Josh is the storyteller.”

He feigned modesty, pressing both hands to his chest in a ‘ _Who? Lil’ ol’ me?_ ’ gesture. “Hey, I’m sure I can cook something up, if you guys are that _desperate_ to hear the smooth, velvety tones of my voice. I got _tons_ of crap saved up for nights like this.”

“Oh, you know what you should tell?” Chris asked, something devious behind the bright glint of his glasses. “The one about—”

_The Blackwood Sanatorium. You know the one! It’s an oldie, but a goodie._

Josh felt the fine hairs at the nape of his neck stand on end as the thought occurred to him, his fingers tightening around his can until the aluminum dented with a quiet _ping!_ His throat ran very dry, heart dropping into his lower intestines. The pieces of s’mores still stuck between his teeth took on the salty bite of blood, and he found himself fighting his gorge to keep from barfing up everything he’d eaten that night. All at once, it was too, too much—the fire, the s’mores, the stars overhead. No snow, no wind, no dancing winter lights in the sky…and _still_ it felt as if they were right outside the lodge, hunched over the fire pit. In fact, if he let his eyes go unfocused, if he stared right into the fire, he could almost make out two other shadows sitting straight across from him. The stars of their own ghost story, maybe not an oldie, but still a goodie in its own right.

“—that weird dude that Brody’s sister brought with us on Spring Break! Hatchet guy?”

Sam’s face contorted in the firelight. “ _Hatchet guy?_ ” she repeated, sounding a little confused and a _lot_ uneasy. “What?”

“Oh _God_ , Hatchet guy,” Ashley said at just about the same time, dropping her hands onto her lap.

And just like that, Josh came back to himself. The tight band of anxiety that had been compressing his chest snapped like an overstretched rubber band, allowing him a long, clean, calming breath. Hell, in the shifting light of the fire, he probably looked halfway normal to the others. “Shit, her weird bootycall? Yeah, no, that’s a good one, okay. Ash has heard this one before, but like…” he shot Chris a look, eyebrows moving up and down rapidly. “It’s a really, _really_ fun one. So buckle the fuckle in, Sammy, it’s gonna be a ride.” He adjusted himself on the seat, spreading his arms in the grand way he had whenever settling into a particularly heinous tale. “So she meets this guy on Tinder, right? And invites him up where we’re staying for the week. Only, here’s the thing. She doesn’t fucking tell… _any_ of us. So—”

When he chanced a glance across the flames again, there were no shadows. It should’ve been a relief, proof that it was nothing more than his grieving brain and wild imagination. Still, he couldn’t ditch the feeling that it meant very little in the overall scheme of things.

The shadows were gone, yeah, but the _ghosts?_ Well, shit.

There was no shaking the feeling _they_ were still there. They’d been plain as day, after all, sitting around the kitchen table.

Hill would probably want to know about that.


	10. Where the horror is (completely hypothetical)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! Before we get into this chapter...you should really go check out this AMAZING aesthetic post that clumsybookworm18 made over on tumblr ( https://clumsybookworm18.tumblr.com/post/185301561350/the-almosts-by-queenofbaws-summary-hannah )! It's gorgeous, it's beautiful, I love it, and I'm sure you will too!!! (Thanks again!!!! ;P)
> 
>  
> 
> Relevant tags for this chapter: Improper use of psychiatric medication, mental illness, discussion of the more problematic aspects of horror as a genre (i.e., sex, racism, cultural differences). Gotta subvert those tropes, friends.

**Tuesday, July 15, 2014**  
**12:06pm**

In his phone, the chat was called ‘ **group**.’ Lowercase-g **group**. Innocuous enough, he hoped, that it would be skimmed over if anyone else ever got it in their mind to scroll through his texts (say, if he wasn’t doing so well at a _certain_ party game). **group** suggested schoolwork, and the boring kind, at that—who wanted to read through a bunch of classmates trying to divvy up parts of a project? No one, that’s who. But…that wasn’t the _only_ reason he’d named it…nah, see, the fact remained that if you went into your phone and actually _titled_ your text threads, the names of the people _in_ said thread didn’t show in your inbox. You had to actually _open_ it and check the info, or, if you were in a _real_ snoopy mood, read the texts themselves to see who’d sent them.

He shouldn’t have felt so, so…so _dirty_ about having it. Lots of people had multiple threads with their friends. Fuck, it was part of communicating in the 21st century! And it wasn’t as though there was anything _in_ the chat that he could be made to feel guilty about. No gossip, no shit talk, no nothing. Nada, baby, the big zip, el zilcho, _nothing!_ The only times it was actually _used_ were in those rare instances where bad news had to be passed around. Or when it was suspected. Anticipated.

That sort of rationalization, he’d found, did not help. No matter how many times he did the math in his head, it always seemed to add up to the same thing: It was a shitty thread, and he was a shitty friend for keeping it in his phone. The only thing that had made him feel _any_ better about the whole situation was that he, himself, had never ever, no way, no how, not _once_ been the one to start a conversation in it. No, no, no.

Not until today.

His phone had been buzzing pretty much nonstop since he’d sent his first message (promptly turning the screen off and setting it face-down where he could at least _pretend_ to hide from the consequences of his actions for a few minutes). God, he was regretting hitting send. But that was in the past, baby, and the future was _now_ , and if his phone kept buzzing like that, it was likely to grind its way through the desk like an electric hand sander.

Chris picked up his phone, swiped to unlock it, and checked what was happening in **group**. 

group  
  
Sam  
I thought it went fine  
Well other than me getting all weepy lol  
Ashley  
You were not weepy, oh my gosh!  
Compared to how I get, you were the Sahara.  
Sam  
…sandy?  
Full of camels maybe  
Ashley  
Uh, dry, you guys. I meant dry.  
Sam  
Well that one definitely makes more sense than mine Ill give you that  
Yeah it was fine though  
Oh except for that story about the guy with the axe  
That was just sort of weird and quite frankly bizarre and uncomfortable :\  
But other than that no complaints  
Ashley  
THANK YOU!  
I have no idea why they like the hatchet guy story so much, but they just…really do.  
And yeah, I thought it was a really good time, all considering!  
Why? Did you think it didn’t go well?  
…  
Chris?  


He drummed the fingers of his left hand on the desk until he was able to scrape the rest of his courage up. This wasn’t exactly the response he had been hoping for. Honestly, it wasn’t exactly the response he’d been _expecting_.

group  
  
nah it was fine  
food was good  
i was jw if you guys noticed anything idk off  
or weird  
Sam  
What about  
Cuz like I said the story was weird  
Especially the part with the pizza box and the shower  
i meant more like  
did you notice anything off about uh  
josh specifically  
i guess  
Sam  
Ashley  


Both Sam and Ashley had been typing when he sent the last flurry of messages. They both promptly stopped, leaving him with the text equivalent of a conversation dropping dead silent and everyone staring wide-eyed.

“Good. Great. Fantastic.” His phone clattered onto the desk as he let go of it, tucking his face into his arms. It had been a line. He’d known that. A big, bold, black line in the sand, and what had he done? By golly, he’d jumped right over that dang thing like a kid playing hopscotch. This was too much. It was _too much_ , he was being a horrible fucking friend, and no doubt both of the girls were staring at their phones at that very moment, trying to figure out why _they_ were friends with him, if he was willing to talk smack on Josh like that and—

Chris cracked an eye to the bright screen of his phone as it buzzed again. He froze for a moment, beginning to sit up with a pronounced caution.

group  
  
Ashley  
I did.  


He would’ve preferred it to have been Sam, but God…he would take it.

Some part of him had hoped this would feel like relief. It didn’t. There was _some_ , maybe, but it was complicated. Messy. Tangled up in a million other emotions, the loudest of which was still guilt.

group  
  
Sam  
Wait what  
What do you guys mean  
Of course hes not gonna be totally normal I mean it was the twins birthday  
Ashley  
Yeah, no, obviously! Obviously, Sam. I totally agree!  
But um…  
Maybe it was just me, and like, it probably was just me actually, but there was that moment.  
Sam  
What moment  
what moment?  
Ashley  
In the kitchen?  
When he told me to get the s’mores stuff?  
Sam  
?  
Still dont get it I guess  
I didnt notice anything weird  
Ashley  
Yeah then it was probably just me!  
for what its worth  
ya boy would v much like to know what this moment was  
Sam  
Ya boy  
Ashley  
Like Sam said, it was nothing!  
He just sort of burst into the kitchen and kinda gave us a real weird look for a while.  
Sam  
He said he saw a bug!  
You guys are so weird omg  
Ashley  
Yeah that’s probably all it was!  
lotsa bugs out in summer  


Chris was hardly aware of his own frown until his glasses began to slide down the bridge of his nose. This whole situation? The whole thing? It could go suck a big ol’ bag of dicks.

He hadn’t _wanted_ to ask them about the other night. He really, truly had _not_ , because that…that wasn’t what he _did_. It wasn’t who he _was_. When it came to issues like this, his usual course of action was to just sort of avert his eyes and cross his fingers, waiting for things to chill out again. Rocking boats was not his specialty. Keeping boats from rocking at all was more his jam. After all, you didn’t need conflict-resolution skills if you never, _ever_ let any conflict happen in the first place.

But shit had been weird. It had been real, real weird.

And not _just_ the other night at the Washingtons’…it wasn’t _just_ that. Yeah, there had been some, uh, concerning moments throughout that little _rendez-vous_ , but it was _more_ than that, too. Sometimes, when he was sitting idly in front of his computer, or signing into some online lobby waiting for a match to start, he’d remember the night Josh had led him through the house like he had. Because of what, a _song?_ He’d laughed it off and they’d both just acted like it was one of their stupid pranks, but…

But _fuck_ , man. Why had it felt so…so… _other?_ He wasn’t the word guy ( _Ash_ was the one with the words), but ‘other’ felt right. It hadn’t felt like a prank, not exactly. There had been too much seriousness in Josh’s voice. Hadn’t there? Was he just misremembering shit now? Trying to connect dots that weren’t actually _there?_

He couldn’t put his fucking finger on it; that was the problem. He couldn’t quite place _why_ he was feeling so uncomfortable about it all. Did he have suspicions? Yes. Yes, he did, in fact, have a pocketful of those. Fat lot of good they would do him. If he went to Josh with nothing but _suspicions_ …

Ha, as if. As-fucking-if. Confront Josh? Nooo. No way. That wasn’t about to happen. You didn’t just _confront_ your best friend and _accuse_ them of the shit they were most self-conscious about. You didn’t show up to someone’s house with a binder full of receipts that you threw on the table and waved towards madly. You didn’t just barge in and say ‘Hey dude, I am like _relatively_ positive that you diddly-darn stopped taking your meds again.’ Even if you thought that. Even if you’d seen it before. Nah, you didn’t _do_ that. That wasn’t…that wasn’t what friends did.

What he needed— _really_ needed—was to compare notes. The three of them needed to sit down and…

No, no they couldn’t do that. Absolutely could not.

He was already being a shitty enough friend just by _entertaining_ these thoughts. Could he actually make Sam and Ashley complicit in that?

Well, Ashley, definitely. Yeah. But Sam? _Sam?_ Chris was coming to suspect that Sam was _incapable_ of even _considering_ that sort of behavior. Sam didn’t _conspire_. Not that this would’ve been conspiring. Not that he was looking for conspirators.

Sam _knew_ enough about Josh to have the conversation Chris wanted to have…but _clearly_ it wasn’t something she wanted to address. Ashley, on the other hand, was raring and ready to go to talk and talk and talk about it all…but she was still missing some big, important pieces of the puzzle. Pieces he was not at liberty to give her. Pieces that Sam had only picked up on accident, it seemed. What was it…irony? Could’ve been, but then again that lit shit was never really his strong suit.

If he kept thinking about this shit, he was going to give himself a migraine.

group  
  
yea forget i even mentioned it  
you know me  
mountains out of anthills  
Ashley  
Molehills?  
???  
Ashley  
It’s “mountains out of molehills.”  
who the hell knows what a molehill looks like  
are they bigger or smaller than anthills?????  
Sam  
Probably depends on the mole Id think  
Ashley  
Good point.  
uh huh whatever  
i’m so glad you guys can gang up on me now  
really it’s a dream come tru  
but hey know what we should do  


He puffed his cheeks out with a heavy exhale as he steeled his nerves again. This shouldn’t have felt so monumental…Sam had done it once. Hell, _Ash_ had initiated it once…so he could do it, too, right? Chris swallowed hard, tapping his thumbs anxiously against the sides of his phone as he waited for any sort of response.

group  
  
Sam  
What  
no you gotta guess  
Sam  
:|  
you could at least TRY sam  
at least throw some pinky and the brain at me  
Sam  
What does THAT mean  
Ashley  
Ugh. Here we go.  
Same thing we do every night?  
Try to take over the world?  
see?????? ash is with it  
Sam  
I so rarely have any idea what you guys are talking about I swear  
Ashley  
Probably for the best.  
Sam  
Probably  
ANYWAY  
we should do a night  
yk without like  
the sad shit  
stuff’s gonna start getting crazy the closer to the new semester we get  
so  
how bout it  
Ashley  
Definitely!  
You know I’m always down to chill.  
gotta practice socializing somehow huh  
Ashley  
Oh, coming from you?  
Hilarious!  
i'm v well socialized tyvm  
Ashley  
So are most chimpanzees.  
Doesn’t mean people enjoy being around them.  
WOWWWWWWWWW  
Sam  
Sounds good to me :)  
We havent done anything at my house yet so why dont we do that  
oh man i'm gonna touch all your stuff  
just really get my greasy lil fingerprints on everything  
literally every single thing  
gonna go thru ALL the cabinets  
Sam  
Have fun with that  
Good luck finding ANYTHING interesting :P  
Here Ill put it in the main chat so we can see when josh is free too  


Well. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Thankfully, it hadn’t caused another full-on stomach lurch (he wasn’t sure how many more of those he could handle in one conversation), though there was still definitely an unpleasant cringing of sorts. 

group  
  
oh yea good thinkin  
totally forgot this wasn’t the main  
see sam??? this is why we keep you around!!!!!  
Sam  
Glad Ive proven my worth  
Truly its the deepest of honors  
Ill be sure to remember this moment when I accept my nobel  


Closing out of the text, he set his phone down again. Chris let his head loll back as he stared up to the ceiling, letting out a low whale-song of a groan. Whatever. Whatever, it was fine. It was good enough. He probably _was_ being overly sensitive, he probably _was_ imagining shit, and he probably _was_ just jumping to stupid conclusions. Things had been getting better, true, but the threat of tension had been looming over them like a dark storm cloud for a _real_ long time. Wasn’t it more likely that he was being overly cautious? Looking out for threats that weren’t really there? Yeah. Yeah, it was.

Shit would calm down. It always _did!_ In the end, things always settled back into some kind of normalcy. They had before, they would again. If nothing else, now that Sam was with them, maybe things would chill out _quicker_ than they had before. She had that effect on people. She was a rational, calm voice when everyone else was screaming; she always knew what to do and what to say and when to say it. And for whatever fucking reason…Josh was telling her stuff. Maybe not _all_ the stuff. But some of the _big_ stuff, all the same.

Chris couldn’t help but wonder if it was any of the stuff Josh didn’t want to talk to _him_ about. Probably. Ouch. But at least he was telling _someone_ , he was talking to _someone_ about it, not just letting it fester. God knew he’d seen firsthand what happened when Josh let shit fester.

As he was letting himself believe the whole ordeal was over, at least for the time being, there was a new blip from his phone. Not from **group** , not from **The Almosts** …but still worrying.

Ashley  
  
Hey, I’m calling.  
Nothing bad, I promise! Just too much to type out!  


Chris took a deep breath, bracing himself. She’d noticed. Of _course_ she’d noticed. She’d caught onto what he’d been planning, and now they were going to have a _real_ uncomfortable conversation about that. And God help him, he took back everything he’d been thinking in the past hour or so—he didn’t _want_ to talk about Josh with Ashley. To quote the great Tommy Wiseau, he did _noooooot_.

His phone only buzzed once before he answered the call. “Yellllllllo?”

“Hey!” Uh oh. That level of energy was really only ever in Ashley’s voice when she was gearing herself up for something unpleasant. As though proving his point, she cleared her throat uncomfortably. “So…okay, there’s no way for me to segue into this, so I’m just gonna, uh, get into it…I wasn’t even gonna bring it up until…oh, whatever. I was gonna bring it up _eventually_. But talking to Sam just reminded me, and… _ugh_ this is what I’m talking about. I’m just gonna get into it.”

A tight, reflexive wince tightened the skin of his face. “Uh huh, well…shoot, I guess. Not like this is a terrifying way to start a convo or anything,” he muttered, rubbing his jaw as though anticipating a punch.

“I’m gonna send you something real quick…just open it, okay?”

“What’re you—” His phone gave a little buzz against his cheek and he pulled it away to check the screen.

Ashley  
  
Hey, I’m calling.  
Nothing bad, I promise! Just too much to type out!  
SEARCH FOR MISSING…  


A hyperlink. He tapped it, his phone’s browser springing to life. He wasn’t familiar with the publication, but it seemed to be some small town newspaper or something similar. The photo was poorly centered and not totally in-focus, showing a handful of park rangers behind a lattice of bright caution tape.

His heart caught in his throat as he scrolled, feeling like the fucking photograph would never end.

_‘SEARCH FOR MISSING WASHINGTON TWINS_ ,’ the title would say. ‘ _SEARCH FOR MISSING TWINS SUCCESSFUL’_ maybe, or ‘ _SEARCH FOR MISSING TWINS CALLED OFF_.’ He wasn’t sure he could say which would be worse. He scrolled and scrolled and scrolled some more until the text began and he felt his entire body unclench. Quickly, he pressed the phone back to his ear. “Ash, I don’t—”

“Just, um…just read it, okay? Take a minute, I won’t hang up or anything.”

“I don’t—”

“ _Read_ it, Chris.”

Blowing a stream of air through his teeth, he did as she said, holding his phone out again so that he could skim the article. 

> **SEARCH FOR MISSING JOURNALIST ENDS IN TRAGEDY**
> 
> _Early on the morning of Friday, July 11, a grisly discovery was made atop Mount Washington. While on a routine patrol, rangers Lionel Simpson (pictured above, left) and Josephine Défago (pictured above, center) came across what appeared to be an abandoned campsite. Upon investigating the campsite, the rangers were shocked and horrified by what they found: human remains._
> 
> _“At first we weren’t sure what we were looking at,” said Défago. “It was only once we got closer that we realized what we were seeing was bones. Even then, there was a good chance they were from some animal—up here on the mountain, where we’ve got wolves and grizzlies, finding a site like this isn’t all that rare.”_
> 
> _However, the rangers would soon realize these were not elk bones. When pressed for details, the park service had no comment, save to say that they had found a significant amount of documentation at the camp to suggest that the remains were those of William Cathcart (59). While a more extensive DNA analysis will be carried out to confirm this identification, only partial remains were discovered at the campsite, making a dental records match impossible._
> 
> _For those of you who may not have been following this tragic story, a brief summary: Missing since late March, Cathcart was—_

He x’ed out of the article, already talking to Ashley before putting the phone to his ear again. “What the _fuck?_ ”

“I know!” she hissed, her tone suggesting she was trying to keep from being overheard. There was a faint creak from her end, followed by the rustle of clothing, and Chris knew implicitly she had taken to pacing. “Just like the hiker, right? The one you told me about?”

Spluttering, he raked the fingers of his free hand through his hair, pushing it up into unwieldy patches. “ _Jesus!_ You _said_ this wasn’t about anything bad!”

There was a surprised pause punctuated by a scoff. “Well, yeah! It’s not! I mean…not anything bad like, as in, _I’m_ not mad at _you_ about anything. That kinda not bad.” She said it with the same sort of tone someone might drawl ‘ _Obviously._ ’

“Ash, you _seriously_ need to work on expressing shit like that more clearly. Most people would consider—” he stopped, shooting a cautious glance towards his bedroom door. He shut it with a quiet _click_ , lowering his voice for good measure. “Most people would consider discovering mysterious body parts around town to be quote-unquote _something bad_.”

“They can’t use the dental records, did you see that? And when you looked up the hiker thing Sam told you about, that was a problem too, right? Or wait, no, shoot, sorry, it was the reverse. They _had_ to, because they found the head _first_. Is that right?” That time, when the rustling came from her end, he recognized it for what it actually was.

Chris sat down on the foot of his bed, squeezing his eyes shut. How precisely had this change in topic happened, again? One minute, he was stressing over whether or not he was…what, _betraying_ Josh by even _considering_ talking about his concerns to the girls, and now…now he was sitting with Ashley as she rifled through what he could only imagine were very well organized murder mystery notes. “Have you been writing this shit down?”

“Have I been writ—of _course_ I have! How else are we supposed to get to the bottom of this?"

“ _We?_ Oh no no no, _we_ are not getting to the bottom of _anything_. Know why?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Because there’s nothing to get to the bottom _of!_ Do you know what this is? All of it? It’s bears, Ash. Big ol’ hungry bears.”

“It… _could_ be bears.” There was something in her voice that suggested, and suggested fairly heavily, that she doubted it. “They _do_ like…carry their prey to their dens, so that could explain why they’re not…finding everything. I guess. But…but it’s not bears, Chris. Bears eat _everything_ , they don’t leave pieces around for people to _find_. And before you say it, wolves don’t either!”

To her credit, his mouth had been open. He had been on the very precipice of saying _exactly_ that. Shot down as he was, all he could do was groan and flop back onto his mattress. “This is seriously messed up. You know that, right?”

“Uh, duh? It’s so creepy. Do you think—”

“No, wait, hang on…you know that I was saying _you_ getting this _involved_ in it is the messed up part, correct?” He could almost hear her pout. Or thought he could. His certainty did a sudden tailspin into doubt-land when her silence lasted a beat too long. Even though he was alone in his room, no one there to see or be seen by, he found himself cracking open one of his eyes. “…you okay over there? Did I say something?”

The rustling had picked up again but it was still a few seconds before Ashley said anything. When she did, the frantic energy of her voice had disappeared entirely, replaced with something that was either exhaustion or the early stages of full-blown misery. “I, um…I kind of need to figure this one out.”

He blinked. When had his throat gotten so tight? “Ash, I don’t, uh…I don’t get it. It’s just two randos who had a real bad time up on the mountain. There’s nothing to—”

“There _is_.” She said it so softly that he almost didn’t hear her. He heard the whoosh of her breath on the other end, and then she tried again. “Maybe it’s nothing. But…but maybe it’s _something_ , Chris. It’s…” Another heavy breath. “It’s summer. We’re going to be heading into fall soon. It’s going to be getting cold again before we know it. Right now, though? _Right now_ , it’s as hot as it’s going to get up there. I know that isn’t saying much, I know it’s still always pretty cold up at the lodge, but…they’re finding bodies, Chris. Bodies of people who went missing _after_ Hannah and Beth.”

He threw his free arm across his forehead, grimacing up at the ceiling and the strange bands of light the sun made through his blinds.

“So…so let’s say. Just…hypothetically, that these are all connected, okay? Hypothetical. If they went missing _after_ the twins, and we’re finding them _now_ , then that _could_ suggest they were buried under less snow or something, right? With the thaw that’s happening, maybe we’re finding more _recent_ victims first. That _could_ mean in the next few weeks—”

“Wait, wait, stop, I…slow down. ‘ _Victims_ ,’ Ash?”

She was quiet.

Chris tried to steady himself, gesturing with the fingers of the hand above his head. “If you’re saying ‘victims,’ that kinda sounds to me like you think there’s someone…” he struggled for a moment, shaking his head. “I don’t know, _responsible_ for all of this.”

Another beat of silence; unlike before, it was wrought with the same energy as when he’d first answered her call, the kind of static crackle that promised one doozy of a storm on the horizon. “We’re talking _two_ headless bodies up on the mountain, now, Chris! This is like, textbook serial killer stuff, and—”

“Ash. _Ash_.” He laid back against his pillows, pulling his glasses off so that he could rub at his face. “I— _serial killer?_ ” Chris shot another wary glance towards his bedroom door, but unless his parents were literally out in the hallway with their ears pressed flush to the door, there wasn’t much chance of being overheard. “Serial killer. I don’t—look, what’s the more likely explanation here? That there’s some messed up, maybe rabid, wildlife up there, chomping at whatever it can find? _Or_ …that there’s a machete-wielding lunatic waiting for clueless tourists to wander off from their friends?” He didn’t need to be able to see Ashley to know _exactly_ the look on her face: forehead creased, brows furrowed, the right side of her bottom lip firmly bit between her teeth. “It’s fucked up! I will give you that, it’s fucked _right_ up. No arguments there. But don’t serial killers usually…I don’t know, taunt the police or some shit like that? They want the limelight, don’t they?”

She sighed, the air passing by the phone making it momentarily sound as though she were caught in a windstorm. “ _Some_ of them, sure…”

“Okay, and how many serial killers do _you_ know whose shtick is to pretend to be a bear, huh? In a bear-infested area? How many? Is it zero? My guess is it’s zero.”

There was another long beat of nothing from Ashley’s side.

“I’m not…fuck, I’m not making fun of you or anything. I’m really not, it’s just…this is all just a lot, okay? A _lot_. And taking a step back for a second, we don’t _know_ that this guy was missing his head. All we know is that they couldn’t get to his teeth. Lots of reasons for that, aren’t there?”

It was hard to say whether it was relief or disappointment in Ashley’s voice as she responded. “Yeah, you’re right. I guess it didn’t actually say that anywhere…but did you get to the end? About the person of interest?”

“I musta missed that part.”

“Uh huh. Cuz you definitely read the whole thing and didn’t just skim it…”

He clucked his tongue in an attempt to bring some sort of levity back into the situation. “Well _excuuuuse_ me. You’ll have to pardon me for needing to sit down after hearing about—” another anxious glance towards his door as he lowered his voice, “—dead guys showing up in the place where we’ve been sipping hot cocoa for the past however-many years. Kind of emotionally jarring. Not _great_ reading material, if I’m being honest.”

“Well there is one. A person of interest, I mean. They don’t give a name, _but_ …”

“But…” he humored her.

On the other end of the phone, notebook pages crinkled. “The reports about the missing hiker _and_ the twins _both_ mention a person of interest, too. I mean, that sounds pretty fishy to me, doesn’t it? Why can’t they track this guy down for questioning? It’s gotta be the same person, don’t you think? How many people are actually _up_ in that area?”

“I don’t like how you automatically assume it’s a dude.”

“The _vast_ majority of serial killers are men.”

“Sounds pretty sexist to me.”

“It’s not sexist, it’s _statistics_. Anyway, it’s a possibility. Can you at least give me that much? That it’s _possible_ these two are connected to the twins going missing?”

God, he was going to have a migraine tomorrow. He felt like a car about to overheat, the discomfort of the situation creeping up and up into a crescendo he didn’t think he’d be able to ignore for much longer. “Anything’s possible,” he said after a while, not without a trace of exasperation. “I just don’t get why you _want_ them to be connected, Ash. If they are, then that means—”

“It means we would have an _answer_. We would _know_. And I think…” She went quiet so suddenly that Chris almost thought the line had died. “I, um…shoot.” Maybe it was his imagination, but he could’ve sworn he heard the click of her throat as she tried to swallow. “I think we all need an _answer_. A definitive fact that we can like…point to, and say ‘This is what happened,’ you know? I think…I think the not knowing is the worst part of all of this. If we can figure it out, if we can outline exactly what happened that night, Point A, Point B, Point C…maybe…maybe it’ll let everyone move on. Am I crazy? That sounds kind of…that sounded a lot better in my head. A lot less, I don’t know, heartless. If it sounded heartless, that is. I didn’t mean for it to sound like that…it’s just…how do you grieve someone you don’t really know is dead?”

Well…shit. There he’d been, hoping against hope that Ashley hadn’t wanted to talk about the whole Josh ordeal only a few minutes ago. And now? Fuck. Bro code or no code, he would’ve _gladly_ spilled the beans on that clusterfuck to get out of this. If he didn’t like talking about the tension between him and Josh, he _hated_ talking about the lodge. He hated talking about That Night, he hated talking about The Prank; two things that had grown so horrible in his mind that they had all but blossomed into actual entities. He found he had to clear his throat for his voice to work, “They’re dead, Ash. There’s no way—”

“I know that,” she said patiently, if not sadly. “ _You_ know that. I _think_ Sam knows that. I don’t…I don’t know about Josh. Really, I don’t know about either of them. I’m not _sure_. I—think about it, okay? For a second. What if it hadn’t been Hannah and Beth? What if it had been me? Would you like…accept that? Or would there be some denial still?”

He winced so hard that he felt it in his toes. “Don’t. I get it. I’m not—” _I’m not gonna go there_ , he thought to himself. _I can’t and won’t_.

“So even if I’m wrong, even if there’s not some crazy person up there, there’s still a _reason_. And I need to figure it out. I _need_ to, okay? Even if it’s stupid and doesn’t make sense. Even if it doesn’t really change things in the end.”

“ _Why_ , though? This shit is only gonna make you feel _worse_.”

She replied too quickly for him to regret asking it; he did, after all, on some level, know the answer. “Because I was _there_ , Chris. I was there, and I was part of it, and Hannah running out there is on me just as much as the others.”

Yeah, tomorrow was shaping up to be a big old migraine day. That much was for sure. If the bed could’ve opened wide and swallowed him whole like Johnny Depp in _A Nightmare on Elm Street_ , that would’ve been just fine by him. The part of him that _needed_ to break the discomfort quickly brewed up a joke about needing a crop-top to really fit the part, but it didn’t even make _him_ laugh. “Yeah, well. _I_ didn’t stop her from running out either.”

Ashley’s silence took on that strange, stormy quality again. “It’s not the same,” she said firmly. “Two… _very_ different situations, Chris.” Something that might’ve been a sniffle, and then she cleared her throat as well. “Uh, do you think there’s any chance _this_ is why Josh has been so weird the past couple weeks? Could he be keeping up with all of this? That’d mess anyone up.”

Despite everything, he caught the implicit message in her wording: She _could’ve_ said something along the lines of ‘ _Has_ Josh been weird the past couple weeks?’ or even ‘ _Why did you say you thought_ Josh has been weird the past couple weeks?’ but she didn’t. She had stated it plainly. “I don’t know,” he admitted with a sigh, “Sam said that she knew for a _fact_ he was listening to that same radio show in the beginning, so…I don’t know. He could be.”

“Yeah, but do you think he’d be doing _research?_ Poking around the internet and stuff like…” Though her voice trailed off into nothing, both of them could hear how she’d _meant_ to end the sentence. _Poking around the internet and stuff like we are._ _Like_ I _am_.

He shrugged, knowing full well that she couldn’t see it. The reality of the situation was that yes, _yes_ he knew Josh, and _yes_ Josh was exactly the sort to go looking around for more details when the facts weren’t particularly forthcoming. More to the point, he knew _Ashley_ would’ve known that, too. “Maybe? But he hasn’t _said_ anything about it—”

“ _Would_ he?”

Nope.

No he would not.

Not to him, anyway. Not to _Chris_.

He didn’t voice _that_ opinion aloud. Instead, he answered her question with one of his own. “If he’d said something about it, don’t you think _Sam_ would be talking about it, too?” Hoping it hadn’t sounded as petulant out loud as it did in his head, he continued, “She’s been pretty good about voicing his concerns lately, wouldn’t you say?” Who was he kidding? He _absolutely_ sounded like a pouty little kid. Fantastic.

Ashley noticed (of _course_ she did); he only needed to hear the tone of her voice to know she’d picked up on it. “I mean, they knew the twins the best. Kinda makes sense he’d talk to her about this stuff more.”

“Mhm.”

“Well…” She stretched the word out like a sticky piece of taffy, her internal debate absolutely _audible_ over the phone. Another second, and she threw her caution to the wind, sniffing airily as she dug her heels in. “And _probably_ because he’s _seriously_ into her. That’s probably playing a part in this, huh?”

At that, he actually sat upright again. “Whoa whoa whoa wait, _what?_ Says who?”

“Says wh—oh my _gosh_ , are you…are you being serious right now? Chris, like. Open your eyes.”

“My eyes are _open_ , they have never been more open in my _life_. I think I would know if Josh was...why do you think he’s into Sam?!”

“Um? Because I’m _incredibly good_ at picking up on that stuff? I _always_ know who’s crushing on who. I—wait, why are you laughing? What? What’s so funny?”

He kneaded at his forehead with the knuckles of his free hand, nervous laughter bubbling out of him like hiccups. “Nothing. Nothing is funny here. Not a single thing. You’re right! You’re _super_ great at picking up on people’s crushes.”

“Well you don’t have to say it in that _voice_ , you know.”

Chris shook his head, a deep crease appearing between his eyebrows as he thought back on it all. How could he have missed _that?_ Somewhere deep, deep down, some little shameful part of him was relieved. Was that what this had been all along? And was that better or worse than what he’d been _assuming_ it was?

Ashley’s voice brought him back to the present, wrenching him from out of his own thoughts. “You’re being awful quiet over there. Did I just blow your mind with that revelation or something? I thought it was pretty obvious, honestly.”

“ _How_ is it obvious?”

“Oh my _God_. For real, are you joking around?”

“I’m not! I-I-I’m _reeling_ here, Ash. Reeling.”

“He’s your best friend,” she said flatly, having no way of knowing the crushing weight those four words would have on him.

A year ago? Sure. Six months ago? Maybe. Today? Eh. Today things were looking a little less certain on that front. “This might surprise you, but there is love enough in this big, handsome heart of mine for many, many friends. I can’t keep track of all of them, I’ve got so many. Remind me, who are you again?”

“Uh huh. You’re _very_ popular.”

“Wow, okay, I see what you mean about the voice thing. Didn’t have to put that much stank on that statement.”

“He’s _always_ talking to her, and when they’re not together, they’re _always_ texting…he’s always talking _about_ her, always sure to invite her to stuff we’re doing…”

“That’s friend stuff. Friends do that stuff. You realize that, yeah? Like, Ash, you pretty much just described you and me.” The silence that fell between them at that moment was almost oppressive in its weight. Chris coughed slightly, if only to break the tension. “Besides, this is _Sam_ we’re talking about. _Sam!_ ”

Ashley made a high-pitched sound of disapproval. “What’s _that_ supposed to mean?! Sam’s _so_ pretty! _I’d_ date Sam if she wanted!”

“Eh…” he seesawed his hand in the air, again realizing too late that she couldn’t see what he was doing. “Not my type. Bossy.”

“I think you meant to say ‘confident.’”

“Confident, bossy, whatevs. Man, oh man…I hate this. I hate that you put this in my head. I—no, wait, I hate that you _literally_ called me to talk about dead guys and now you’re talking about _this_. Why can’t we have normal conversations? Why can’t we just talk about like, the weather. Or, okay not sports, um…”

“Think we should set them up?”  
  
“What.”

“Sam and Josh.”

“I—no. _No_. Oh _God_ , no. No.”

Ashley snorted a quiet laugh, and there was a rustle from her end, as though she too were trying to find a comfortable position in bed. “Wow.”

“Look. Let’s say your right. _HYPOTHETICALLY,_ ” he made wild finger-quotes in the air, mocking her tone of voice from earlier. “Do _you_ want to deal with them getting all touchy-feely whenever we hang out?” He raised his eyebrows, fixing his phone with a contemplative stare. There was no immediate response from Ashley. “Yeah. Uh huh. That’s what I _thought_. Let them figure that shit out on their own. I can only handle so many crises at once, and for the time being, _you’ve_ made ‘headless bodies’ the top of the list, okay? Number two, by the way? On Facebook, the guy assigned to be my new roommate lists his interests as ‘World War II, hentai, and critiquing craft barbeque sauces.’ How much of that is ironic? I don’t know. And I _can’t_ know until I actually meet him. So. I would _appreciate_ it if you didn’t throw our friends’ romantic lives into that particular centrifuge, because I’m reaching critical capacity over here.”

She snorted again, the sound nearing actual, genuine amusement. “Let me see if I have this right: You’d rather talk about dead guys than Josh and Sam?”

“Hundred percent. No questions asked.” She laughed outright at his deadpan response, he smiled at the sound, and for a moment things were fairly all right again. He’d be leaving the conversation with a lot to think about, sure (maybe _too much_ to think about), but as far as Blackwood-themed powwows went, it felt like they’d be getting out of this one mostly unscathed. Ashley could keep cranking away at her true-crime theories, he could sit and try to unravel the whole unexpected romantic subplot aspect of it, and life could return to its usual ebb and flow. Nothing had really _changed_ —they hadn’t found the twins, there hadn’t been an actual fight or argument breaking out between anyone, and save for the threat of a headache throbbing at the edges of his vision, nothing bad had come of _any_ of it.

Or so he fucking thought.

The thought had only just occurred to him when Ashley spoke up again. “Hey, uh, Chris?”

“Mhm?”

“Earlier, did you _actually_ forget to include him? Or was it like…intentional?”

Strangely, there wasn’t any feeling of being called out or caught with his hand in the cookie jar; what there _was_ , he was unhappy to realize, was something akin to _relief_.

A million years ago in their dorm room, Josh had accused him of something. What had that been?

_‘You give her_ just _enough. You leave little fucking clues for her to piece together like she does_.’

And you know what? Maybe he did. Maybe he _did_ , and maybe he _knew_ it was enough for her to cobble together the underlying story. Maybe he _wanted_ her to know what he knew, what _Sam_ knew. Maybe he wanted _her_ to be the one he could confide in about all the Josh stuff. Maybe all of that was true! But it wasn’t like he was explicitly _saying_ anything, wasn’t spilling all the nitty gritty for anyone to overhear. You couldn’t fucking present _insinuation_ in court as evidence, you couldn’t convict someone for vague speculation.

He realized he was taking too long to respond and tried to cover it up with a tired chuckle. “It was just a _mistake_ , Ash. No subterfuge intended.”

And Ashley—bless her fucking _heart_ —almost let it go just like that. “‘kay. Just thought I’d ask, is all.” Before either of them could start the ridiculous back-and-forth game of deciding who would hang up first (a game that typically resulted in another forty minutes of conversation before someone’s battery beeped), she spoke up again. “Not that I’d blame you, y’know. If it wasn’t a mistake.”

*******

**Friday, July 25, 2014**  
**5:43pm**

“Can you get that?” She looked up from the stove, swiping her bangs out of her face with her arm. “ _Dad!_ ”

“Huhwha?” came the distant reply. Upstairs, it sounded like.

“ _Can you get the d—_ ugh. _NEVERMIND!_ ” Sam wiped her hands off on her pants and lowered the temperature of the burner before heading towards the front door. “Gotta do _everything_ myself around here, huh?” she joked under her breath, popping up onto her tiptoes to peer through the peephole. “Well, well, well…” she swung the door open and leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed. “Look who the cat dragged in.”

“Wow, what a warm, inviting welcome from _Chez Giddings_. Giving me the warm fuzzies over here, Sammy.” Josh pushed his sunglasses up onto his head, peeking around her shoulder into the house. “No soccer-mom-mobile in the driveway, no high-pitched yelling from inside…am I to take it that the dorks haven’t gotten here yet?”

She rolled her eyes as she stepped back, giving him room to actually cross the threshold. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Nah, you’re first. Congrats! You must be so proud.”

“I am, I am!” He snickered, leaning in confidentially as he walked in, “Do you, uh, think they’re off making out somewhere?”

“No.”

Josh sighed dramatically, “Yeah, me neither. A man can fucking _dream_ though.” He toed his shoes off onto the mat, looking around the foyer. “Nice digs you got here, girly girl. I am _especially_ fond of all the…are those snow globes?”

“They are,” she snickered, not even bothering to glance over her shoulder to the shelf. “Dad collects them. It’s one of those weird, inexplicable parent things, like Ash’s mom and all her salt lamps. You know how it goes.”

“Do I _ever_.” For an instant, the image of all those old blood capsules Bob kept in the lodge’s basement flickered into his mind. “We all gotta have our hobbies, huh?”

“Sure hope I’m not hearing anyone talking crap about my interior decorating.” Scott Giddings descended the stairs two at a time, clearly in some sort of rush. He finished strapping on what seemed to be a watch, peering into the cracked door of the kitchen before turning his attention to the two of them. “It’ll make more sense when you’re older. Hate to tell you that.” Save for the color of their hair, the Giddings’s resemblance to one another was almost purely suggested. It was that vague sort of similarity that you couldn’t pin down to one thing in particular—not face shape, not bone structure, _maybe_ you could see it in the nose, but even then it was only from certain angles. You could _tell_ they were related, though, even if you did have to squint your eyes and tilt your head to one side. ‘ _Ooh_ ,’ most people would say after a second or two, ‘ _Yeah, okay, I see it!_ ’

Josh waved it off casually, shaking his head. “Trust me, _my_ pops has enough old movie posters we could use ‘em as wallpaper.” He folded his arms across his chest before thinking better of it, sticking his hand out, “Oh, duh, sorry—I think we met before, but uh, it wasn’t really the most ideal of situations, huh?” He rolled his eyes as though recalling a minor inconvenience instead of that horrible, unspeakable first week at the lodge. It was easier that way. He hoped he wasn’t being _too_ transparent with that, but he had a sinking suspicion that Giddings Senior was buying it just about as much as Giddings Junior. “It’s Scott, right?” he glanced to Sam for confirmation. “Can I call you Scott?”

“Well, if preference is figuring into it, I think I’d prefer Mr. Giddings, for now…” his eyes _also_ moved to Sam’s, and his amused expression was easier to read than a large-print children’s book. ‘ _This one’s related to HANNAH?’_ that look said. ‘ _You’ve gotta be pulling my leg.’_

There was, admittedly, a bit of a discrepancy between Hannah’s self-confidence and Josh’s. In the few times they’d met, Hannah had always greeted Sam’s dad with a meek wave and a quiet sound that _could’ve_ been a hello; Beth had been more personable, sure, definitely more comfortable with answering pointless parent questions (“You girls having fun over there?” “So how’s school going?” “Anyone need anything from the kitchen?”). The fact remained that neither of them could’ve _possibly_ prepared him for _Josh_ , he of the self-assured grin and unexpected ooze of charisma. Hell, the Josh he’d briefly met at the lodge all those months ago couldn’t have prepared him for _Josh_ -Josh.

_Josh_ -Josh, after all, took the comment in stride, still beaming as he nodded. “Mr. Giddings. Gotcha. Lovely home. Sweet snow globes. Hey, I can tell you gotta jet, but I’ve got a real quick question for you, if you have a minute. Man-to-man.”

The entertainment on his face, if possible, seemed to intensify. “Uh huh?” he asked. “What would that be?”

Completely straight-faced, Josh asked, “What’s Sam’s middle name?”

“ _No!_ ” She all but leapt in front of him, trying to form a physical barrier between Josh and her dad; clamping her hands over Josh’s ears, she turned to her dad and repeated, “No. Do not. Do _not!_ ”

He favored the two of them with a confused, if not faintly curious look before widening his eyes and shaking his head in the universal parental sign for ‘All right, then.’ “I can see I’ll be missing out on a real interesting evening,” he sighed, grabbing a windbreaker from the coat hook as he skirted around them. “Try not to burn the kitchen down, all right, hon?”

Still actively working to shove Josh away from her, Sam flipped him a quick, neat little salute (the same sort, an astute observer might’ve noticed, that Chris had a habit of firing off). “I appreciate your faith in me.”

“I think his faith is totally well founded, _hon_ ,” Josh snickered, bringing his hands up to guard against a clearly half-assed smack aimed at his shoulder. His grin only widened when Sam jabbed an angry finger in his direction, mouthing something so her dad couldn’t hear. He glanced back up and beamed, “Don’t worry, Mr. Giddings, I can _personally_ guarantee you that I won’t let Sam set fire to anything. Don’t want you coming home to a smoldering pile of wreckage, now, do we?”

He drew his eyebrows upwards and inwards as he smiled, another classic parental expression: ‘Oh God help me, _I_ was this ridiculous once, wasn’t I?’ His car keys jingled in his hand as he unlocked the door.

It was at that very instant that the doorbell rang, and rang quite _loudly_ , startling all three of them into a discordant volley of surprised shouts.

Once the shock had subsided, Sam couldn’t help but laugh, both hands clutched tightly over her heart. “ _Jeez_.”

“Y’okay over there, _hon?_ ” Josh asked, getting a well-deserved elbow in the side for his efforts.

Scott opened the door to reveal—lo and behold—Chris and Ashley, both caught between sheepish grins and grimaces, having clearly heard their yelling. “Hello…?” Chris said uncertainly, Ashley giving a tiny wave.

“Hello,” Scott said, chuckling by that time. He scooted around them with a friendly wave of his own. “And goodbye,” he added as he made a beeline for his car.

Sam ushered them in and closed the door. “What an entrance. Has anyone ever told you two that you have pretty decent comedic timing?”

Chris opened his mouth, already sporting a cheesy grin, when Ashley cut him off. “No,” she intoned flatly, bending down to remove her shoes. “Not ever.”

“Good, cuz you don’t,” Josh said, brow knitting slightly as he got a good look at them. “Hey, so, Ash…” he circled around her once before stopping right in front of her, setting his chin atop his fist thoughtfully. “Can you explain the… _this?_ ” He reached over, twisting a finger into one of the two low pigtails she was sporting, giving it a light schoolyard bully tug. “How awfully Jessica Riley of you! It’s an inspired choice, to be sure.”

Immediately she pushed his hand away, pursing her lips in frustration. “Shut _up_.” She paused, a concerned wrinkle momentarily marring her forehead, “Why? Does it look bad?”

“Bad? Nah. It just looks like _Jess_ ,” Josh said, shrugging. “If that’s the look you’re going for, then by all means. Definitely new and exciting.”

When she turned to him, Chris threw his hands up in front of himself defensively. “I mean it…kinda looks like a Jess thing. Not that that’s _bad_ or anything!” he quickly backpedaled.

By the time Sam managed to wriggle her way over to her, Ashley was already tugging the elastic ties from her hair, finger-combing it back out so it would lay flat. “ _I_ liked it,” she said, leaning her shoulder against hers. “What do either of those schmucks know about anything?” She received a small, dejected smile for her effort, but then Chris was talking again.

“Was your dad in _scrubs_ , Sam?”

“Nah, he just likes going to work in _really_ boring pjs.” She shot him a saccharine grin before rolling her eyes. “He definitely was. I thought you guys knew he was a nurse? Haven’t I said that?” Sam glanced between the lot of them, trying to take inventory of their faces, “Coulda _sworn_ I’d said something about it.”

“Isn’t it, uhhh,” Chris checked phone for the time, “…a little _late_ for people to be getting their checkups? Is there a doctor’s office around here that stays open this late?”

Reaching behind Ashley, she latched the deadbolt, shooing everyone towards the dining room. “Nope. He works in the ER. Can’t really close those. I mean you _could_ , but it would be _real bad_.”

“Jesus tap-dancing Christ, how does he do _that?_ ”

Sam smiled dryly, wiggling her eyebrows in a manner that wasn’t entirely unlike the way Josh did it. “We’re a family that knows how to cope with chaos, I guess. We— _agh!_ ” Pushing past the guys, she darted into the kitchen just in time to save the pot from boiling over onto the burners.

Josh leaned over to Chris, quirking a brow, “Coping with chaos. A-plus effort. Showing us how it’s done.”

“The door is open and I can _absolutely_ hear you!” Sam shot back over her shoulder. “Did no one ever teach you to be _polite_ to the people handling your food?”

It was all salvageable, thank the _Lord_ , and despite all the jokes, the smoke detector didn’t go off even _once_. They were happy enough to gorge themselves on the pasta and breadsticks until everything tasted vaguely of garlic, the dining room lit up gorgeously by the sun preparing to set outside the bay window.

Where the Browns’ apartment was close and cozy, the Giddings’s was open and airy; where the Hartleys’ house was warm and likely a bit _too_ decorated, the Giddings’s was cool and sparse; where the Washingtons’ estate was pristine and terribly hollow, the Giddings’s was comfortable and lived-in. It was like the perfect Goldilocks compromise between them all, unassuming enough to be _just right_. The picture of suburban living. This hardly occurred to any of them as they ate and talked about nothing in particular, but the fact remained all the same, another reminder that despite all the odds, they were a complementary group, the four of them.

When all that was left were smears of red sauce on plates, Sam stacked everything up, assuring everyone that “I’ve got it, I’ve _got_ it! You’re my _guests!_ ” before disappearing back into the kitchen, the door swinging shut behind her.

Stretching out contently, Chris draped one of his arms over the back of one of the table’s unoccupied chairs. “So hey, I realized the other night that it’s been _forever_ since we had an update. How’s filming going? Hear from Big Bob lately?”

Josh rolled his eyes with a long-suffering sigh. “Last _I_ heard, they were held up when one of the blood pumps malfunctioned.”

“Ew.” Ashley’s lip curled into a grimace as she stared down into her drink, swirling her straw to create a mini-whirlpool.

“Malfunctioned _how?!_ ”

He blew a horribly wet, prolonged raspberry, flaring his fingers out wide. “I guess the set ended up looking like a, uh—pardon the irony here—murder scene.”

“ _Ew_ ,” Ashley repeated, significantly more impassioned.

“So I’m sure he’s just happy as a clam over there. Not like the franchise is called _BLOOD Monastery,_ or anything. If you ask me…” he leaned an elbow against the table casually, shrugging with his other shoulder. “He should just make lemonade, right? What’s a good horror flick without a geyser of blood?”

It was then that Ashley actually glanced up from the tornado in her glass, shooting Josh a look that both he and Chris recognized immediately. It was the debate look, the look that made it clear why he sometimes called her Encyclopedia Brown. She took in a deep breath through her nose.

He leaned farther over the table, trying not to grin too widely. It was a discussion (read: argument) that they’d had many, many, _many_ times before. You couldn’t count on all your fingers and toes how many times some iteration of it had reared its ugly head. This time around, though? He was ready and raring to go. “Say it,” he drawled, his eyebrows giving a provocative little arch.

Chris glanced between the two of them, seemed to realize what was about to happen, and preemptively winced. “Oh _GOD_ —hey Sam?” he called over his shoulder. “Do you need any help? Please? Any help at all?”

“I just think,” Ashley began, her tone already airy with feigned nonchalance, “That _good_ horror shouldn’t rely on all that cheap stuff, anyway.”

“ _Cheap stuff?_ Cheap stu—blood and guts is the bread and butter of the industry, Ashley my sweet summer child.”

The corners of her mouth turned down. “Well the _industry_ needs to get some new tricks. There’s a _reason_ no one takes horror seriously—”

“Really, Sam!” Chris continued, voice cracking comically, “If you need any help just say the word! I will be…right there if you need me!”

“—and that _reason_ is that it’s gross and outdated.” To punctuate her point, she offered him a quirked eyebrow of her own, and a flourish as she grabbed a breadstick from the plate on the table.

Slowly, Josh brought his hands together, folding them in front of his mouth. He watched her from over his fingers contemplatively before setting his chin atop them. “The girl who cried— _cried_ —watching _Jaws_ is going to lecture me on what makes something _scary_. Okay. Okay, that makes sense.”  
  
“Things can be _scary_ without all the blood and guts! Things can be _terrifying_ without blood and guts!”

“Disagree. Gotta have that _visceral_ human reaction.”

“Disgust isn’t the same as fear.”

“Uh, I think they sure overlap.”

“Look, at the end of the day, horror as a genre is just a bunch of…” she gestured vaguely, brandishing her breadstick like a wand. “Old cautionary tales that we keep repurposing over and over and over again. If the _only_ thing keeping it new and fresh and exciting is the gross stuff, then like…what’s the _point?_ ”  
  
From where he sat, head in his hands, glasses perched up on his forehead, Chris groaned. “I am in Hell. I have gone to Hell. Couldn’t be done with Lit once last semester ended, nooo. Gotta sit here and pay for my food with… _this._ You guys got any sick motifs you wanna analyze? Ooh, can we talk about like, the color of the drapes and what they mean? God, I need more STEM friends. Or just one. _One_ STEM friend. That would be a nice balance.”  
  
With a jovial shoulder shove, Josh cut him off. “Hey, let the lady speak her mind! I, for one, am _immensely_ interested in this train of thought.” He turned back to Ashley with an overly complicated wave of his hand, welcoming her to continue. “ _En_ lighten me, please, Miss Brown. Since you’ve clearly put so much thought into this. Don’t get me wrong, the thought you’ve put into it is _wrong_ , but I’m not here to stifle your fighting spirit.”  
  
She fought the urge to roll her eyes, shooting him a sardonic smile instead, wrinkling her nose up in a show of irritation. “Here’s what I’m saying. Horror in writing? Sure, that can be effective! It can build dread! Uncertainty! But when you sit down to a horror _movie_ , you know _exactly_ what’s going to happen—almost immediately, I might add.”  
  
“Again, I disagree, but whatever.”  
  
“Okay—bear with me, then.” Ashley spread her arms wide as though setting a stage. “The movie starts. You see on the screen in front of you…a group of people. Probably teenagers. Sometimes adults. _Usually_ adults pretending to be teenagers. Whatever. People. Before anything spooky or creepy or supernatural happens, _two_ of those people split off from the others in one way or another, and they go off alone to…” she sucked her teeth, “ _Fool around_.”

Cupping his hands around his mouth, Josh stage-whispered, “You can say the ‘s-e-x word’ Ash. You’re a big girl, now.”  
  
Chris made a show of perking his head back up, letting his glasses fall into place. “Okay, see, _now_ I’m interested.”  
  
She flicked a fine spray of crumbs at him before wiping her hands off on a napkin. “Oh, stuff it.”  
  
“That _does_ sound like what they’d be doing, yeah.” With a laugh, he and Josh high-fived up over their heads.  
  
“ _Anyway_ …” she said, raising her voice to drown him out. “What do you, as the viewer, _immediately_ think when you see that happen?”  
  
Leaning in on his elbows, Chris glanced furtively from one side of the room to the other. “I’m thinking, ‘ _Please God, please God, don’t let my parents choose this precise moment to walk in and offer me snacks._ ’” That one _did_ get a laugh from Ashley, and he sat back with a small, self-satisfied grin.  
  
“I’m thinking something more along the lines of, ‘ _Yesssssss_ ,’” Josh added with a low guffaw and a victorious fist-pump. He and Chris took a moment to high-five _again_ , leaving Ashley to groan dramatically.  
  
“You’re both _so_ stupid. I hope you know that. That’s not what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘ _Here we go,_ I _know who the first ones to die are gonna be_.’”  
  
Straightening back up, Chris shrugged. “Oh, yeah, well obviously. You don’t do the do in a horror movie and _live_.”  
  
“No,” Ashley agreed, “You don’t. Do you know _why?_ ”  
  
With a long, unnecessarily drawn-out sigh, Josh set his cheek against a hand. “I do, actually. But I have this crazy idea that you’re about to tell us anyway. Who am I to take that joy away from you?”  
  
“ _You’re_ the one who wanted to talk about it!”  
  
“And now I’m regretting that decision. I’m only human, Ash. We all make mistakes.”  
  
She scrunched her mouth into a small, displeased shape, folding her arms across her chest. After a minute, she simply shrugged, letting her shoulders drop back down.  
  
Josh snorted a laugh, “God, I’m _kidding_. None of you candyasses know how to take a joke!” He sighed, “They die because shit like that is supposed to _scare_ people into not doing something similar. It’s a morality tale. I’m on this shit like white on rice, honeypie. _Trust_ me. Jason takes a machete to any girl who shows her tits, Freddy slices up the smooth-talking ladies man, Michael Myers goes after the sexy babysitter, meanwhile little Cindy-Lou watching all this happen in an old Ford pickup at the drive-in realizes ‘Uh oh, better not give Bobby that handy-j after all! What if _that_ happens to _me?!_ ’” It was his turn to shrug, “But that was back in like…the ‘70s and ‘80s. Times change, everyone bangs before they get married, so I’m not buying this whole ‘cautionary tale’ thing.”

“… _handy-j?_ ” Chris’s voice was strained with agony. “ _Dude_.” He turned over his shoulder again, the kitchen door still closed. “ _Sam!_ _I am_ _actually dying!_ ”

From the other side of the door, muffled, came her response. “You’re _fine!_ ”

“I’m _not!_ ”  
  
“Okay,” Ashley said, and Josh realized with all the resignation of a man being mauled by a bear that she was assuming the tone and posture she _always_ did when she was about to _really_ dig her heels into something. “If times change so much, then why is it _still_ the same in movies _today?_ You drink, do any kind of drugs, or have sex in one of those movies, you’re like…signing your own death warrant!”

He rolled his eyes up to the fan turning lazy circles above them. “Because the writers are uninspired hacks, Ash.”

“Mhm.” For a moment—one _blessed_ moment—it seemed her lecture was over. The moment passed, as all moments tended to do. “New hypothetical group.”  
  
“Am I going to need a pen and paper for this?” Chris asked, settling in for whatever ride the three of them were all about to take. “Will there be complex math involved? Will I need a protractor?”  
  
“In this hypothetical group, _no one_ does any of that stuff.”

Oooh. She thought she was _so_ slick. She wasn’t, though, not even a little. Nah, Josh could see where she was going from a mile away. He had to give her _some_ credit—annoying as it was, she was proving to be a fairly decent, if not unaware, sounding board for his _own_ project. “Let’s not even _bother_ with the hypotheticals then, huh? Why don’t we say it’s _us?_ I think our group works, don’t you? Drinkin’ our lil’ diet sodas, no drugs—”

There was a beat of silence. Awkward, uncomfortable, skin-crawling silence.

“…no sex.”

“God, you don’t have to fucking rub it in. Unnecessary.” He laughed, waving her on with a swirl of his hand. “We’ll cut to the chase. Which of _us_ dies first, right? Now, I’ll let it slide that there would _never_ be a horror movie about characters just like us—never ever forever amen—because you can’t _have_ a horror flick with _just_ the nerds, _but!_ You look at our precious little group, you hear the spooky music rising…and even _still_ , you have a good suspicion _one_ of us in particular is gonna die first.”

She didn’t say anything in response, only raising her eyebrows.

“You can say it,” Josh sighed. “ _You’re_ the one who brought up a second group. So go on, make your point!”

“Could someone maybe fill me in?” Chris looked from one to the other, clearly resigned to his fate. “Is it me? Is this another slick way of bringing up my dad-bod? I will _literally_ get up and walk right out of here—”

“It’s _me_ ,” Josh’s answer was matter-of-fact as he shifted his gaze from Ashley to Chris. He lowered his voice to a near-whisper, widening his eyes knowingly as though sharing an unspeakably salacious secret, “Cuz everyone knows if you’re not pasty and white, you’re in for a fright! Am I on the right track, Hermione?”

Ashley rolled her eyes before going back to her drink. “It’s true. It’s gross and it’s true.”  
  
Josh clucked his tongue, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “ _If_ the writers are _hacks_ ,” he repeated, adding a singsong lilt to his voice. “Shit isn’t _that_ bad these days. We’ve gotten over most of that crap.”  
  
She blew a derisive breath from over the rim of her glass. “Horror is outdated. And it’s—for the most part—rooted in old, antiquated, _offensive_ prejudices and fears that society can’t be bothered to update. Because it’s _safe_ to make horror movies, it’s _safe_ to follow a formula and _know_ that on opening night there’ll be a packed house. It’s why there are like…twenty _Saw_ movies! It’s why they just won’t stop making _Paranormal Activity!_ It’s because horror movies are…” searching for the right comparison, she flung her arms out to her sides. She spluttered around the gist caught on the back of her tongue, managing to say _something_ …but uh. Probably not the _right_ thing. “Horror movies are like porn.”  
  
Another long, deafening silence fell between them as the gravity of what Ashley had just said settled like old fish food drifting to the bottom of a tank. It sat there, unavoidable, inscrutable, but at the same time, strangely appealing some terrible way.  
  
Chris opened his mouth to respond. Josh held a hand up to him, gaze still firmly fixed on Ashley. “ _Explain_ ,” he said, brows knitted tightly together, causing his forehead to wrinkle.  
  
The color of her cheeks had deepened, but to her credit, Ashley did, in fact, have an explanation locked and loaded. “People know what’s going to happen as soon as they turn it on, there’s never any real plot, and they’re only watching it for like…a combined total of three minutes to get an endorphin rush. So.”  
  
Josh narrowed his eyes, slowly lowering his hand from Chris’s face as he simultaneously leaned his torso further across the table towards her. “Ash,” he said, voice soft and confidential. “Is that why you think people watch porn? Because if so, we need to stop talking about _this_ , and we need to _start_ talking about _that_.”  
  
“Speak for yourself,” Chris muttered.  
  
Turning to him abruptly, Josh clapped his hands, “Oh is _this_ the conversation now? Okay, works for me. Better than _Tv Tropes_ over here flapping her gums about stuff she doesn’t know about. All right Cochise, what kind of porn do _you_ watch, then?” He set his elbows on the table, chin in his hands, and stared at Chris with the wide-eyed wonderment of a child getting ready for a bedtime story.

Before he had an opportunity to respond, Ashley had turned to him, too. “Yeah,” she smirked, _clearly_ relieved that the attention had been shifted from the terrible, horrible, stupid thing she had just said. “What kind _are_ you watching, Chris?”  
  
He made a sound that wouldn’t have been out of place coming from a gutted pig, lowering his head back into the safety of his arms. “Literally the worst—you’re all literally the worst.” Face still buried, he waved a hand, shooing them. “Go back to your philosophical bullshit. I’ll be here when you’re done. I’ll be _dying,_ but here.”  
  
It was, unsurprisingly, Josh who picked the almost-argument back up, shaking his head. “Yeah, fine, there’s some predictability you gotta contend with, _sure_. But what about your precious mystery novels, huh? We _all_ know it was Jenkins the butler. It’s _always_ the butler.”  
  
“First of all,” she held a finger up, “It’s _not_ always the butler. It’s almost _never_ the butler, and at this point, if it _was_ the butler, it would be _hilarious_. Secondly. I didn’t say there was anything _wrong_ with predictability, but there’re problems with what that predictability says about the _genre!_ When you’re killing off people who are having sex, or people who belong to different ethnicities, or when you’re using imagery and stuff from a culture you don’t understand to make something spooky, or when the surprise twist is that the main character had some serious mental illness all along…” she waited a beat, and only a beat, noticing the way Chris seemed to tense across the table and Josh remained almost pointedly impassive before her, both unknowingly and implicitly confirming a suspicion she’d been harboring since that strange conversation on her balcony. “When you _do_ that, what you’re _saying_ is ‘These things are bad. Or these things are scary. These are things we should _fear_ , and these are things we should vilify.’” She shrugged again, “And that’s _messed up_.”  
  
Josh watched her carefully for a moment, brow furrowing and unfurrowing. He was so quiet for so long that when he finally did speak, Ashley felt her stomach drop in anticipation of having offended him. “I knew it,” he said softly. And then, louder, “I _knew_ it!!” He slammed one fist on the table, causing her to jump. “You _were_ the one writing all of Cochise’s English essays for him!”  
  
In unison, they groaned, Chris lolling his head back onto his shoulders. “She hasn’t been _writing_ them! Just… _helping_.”  
  
“I _knew_ all that analytical, internet forum bullshit was familiar. God, Ash, can’t you try a _little_ harder? Get my boy here an A instead of that sad, scrawny B he finished out with?” He laughed before reaching across the table, taking both of her hands in his. “I appreciate all the blogs you must’ve read and all the grad students you must have consulted with to compose that _beautiful_ thesis. Really, I do. But here’s the thing. The thing I’ve been repeating the whole time. You’re talking about the hacks. The lazy ones. The _uninspired_. For every shit horror movie out there, for every hashtag-problematic premise someone barfs onto a script, there’s something _life changing_ just around the corner. There’s a _Jacob’s Ladder_. There’s an _Eraserhead_. There’s a _The Thing_.” He squeezed her hands, just slightly, “You gotta _subvert_ those shitty tropes. You gotta make the audience think one thing, and then you gotta _flip the script!_ You gotta make them think it’s the butler, but then it turns out it’s the flesh-eating monster locked in the attic. Make them _think_ the naked blonde’s gonna bite it first, show all the gory details, and then have it turn out to have been _her_ plan all along—you follow?”  
  
She sighed loudly. “My original point stands,” Ashley sniffed, pretending to try and wrench her hands out of his. “You can _do_ that without all the blood and guts.”  
  
“Mmm. No you can’t.”  
  
“You _can_ , though.”  
  
“You can’t.”  
  
She finally managed to free her hands, taking the opportunity to lift her drink to her lips, but only after making a noise of disagreement. “Plenty of people do. You don’t need gore to make something _really_ scary. All you need people.” She shrugged, “People being people is the scariest thing on Earth.”  
  
“Wow,” Chris said, beginning a mocking slow clap. “That was _deep_. Print that on a t-shirt. I’d wear it.”

“You know, Cochise,” Josh drawled as he turned towards him once more. “You never answered my question.”

“Oh shut up, man.”

“What kind of porn _have_ you been watching, my dude?”

“Shut _up_.”

There was a loud sigh from the other side of the room as Sam reappeared, shaking her head dejectedly. “Really picked a _great_ time to rejoin the conversation, I guess.” She held a hand up as all three of them looked to her, immediately talking over one another. “Oh no. No, no thanks. Nope. Don’t want to hear about _anyone’s_ preferred porn, actually. I feel like our friendship will be stronger if certain things _remain_ a mystery.” She propped the door open with her hip, nodding towards Chris, “I decided I _do_ need help. Get in here.”

Chris sprang up without needing to be told twice. “Thank you thank you thank you,” he dramatically whimpered, half-bowing in front of her.

“Do you need us to—”

“Nope,” Sam said, cutting Ashley off; in one swift motion, she nudged Chris into the kitchen with her and pulled the door shut behind them. “I figure we can let ‘em keep going on about…whatever you guys were talking about.”

“Uh, the shortcomings of horror as a genre.” He held a pinky up as he said it, giving himself a terrible British accent. “Remember what it was like in school when the two smartest kids in class got into a debate? Yeah. Yeah, that, only one of them is _obsessed_ with it, and the other just has a lot of opinions.” Chris shuddered. “Coulda saved me like, ten minutes ago, you know. That woulda been cool…”

She smiled understandingly, some quiet voice in the back of her head wiggling this way and that, giving her the shapeless impression that she _had_ , actually, heard Josh and Ashley have a similar conversation before. When had _that_ been? It probably wasn’t important. She stepped away from the door, absently chewing at the inside of her cheek as she contemplated her next move. Her opportunity came sooner than she expected—Chris made for the kitchen sink where all the dishes were stacked, but before he could slip past her, Sam grabbed his forearm, jokingly tugging him back.

“Handsy!” He jokingly waved an admonishing finger in her face, pursing his lips. “My body, my rules, Sam. Can’t just be grabbing on all this voluptuousness whenever you want.”

Her grimace was almost comical in its intensity. “Uh huh. Okay. I’ll keep _that_ in mind.” Quickly, she snuck a peek around his side, double-checking that the others hadn’t actually followed after them. Shock of shocks, the door was still closed, and…what was that? Yeah, voices could still be heard, muffled and unintelligible, as Josh and Ashley picked up where they’d left off. Sam reckoned she and Chris could deep-clean the entire kitchen, organize the fridge, move all the cereals into alphabetical order in the pantry, and the two of them would _still_ be talking by the time they were done. She smiled, but realized there was a fair amount of uncertainty behind it. When she turned back to Chris, she could feel that uncertainty pull her mouth into a different shape altogether. “Hey, uh, just real quick…I know you said you were kinda worried about… _stuff_ ,” she gave the word a few extra syllables for good measure.

Chris’s smile didn’t waver, but it did _change_ in some small, difficult to place way.

“And I get it—I do, for real.” Sam held her hands up defensively, nodding as she spoke. “But…this was _good_ , right? Normal.” She felt her eyebrows draw inwards and upwards hopefully. “Even the…” she flapped her hand towards the closed door and the voices beyond it. “ _Spirited_ conversation.”

“Y-yeah. Yeah! Yeah, it’s been great. Definitely!”

“You’re not being particularly convincing right now. I hope you know that.”

Clearly uncomfortable, he crossed his arms over his chest, shifting his weight onto his other leg. “I just…” he averted his eyes, suddenly very interested in the Giddings’s choice of floor tiles. “I’ve been around the block with this before, that’s all. Sometimes I get…nervous about shit.” He shrugged, his shoulders rising and falling stiffly, “But if _you’re_ not worried, then _I’m_ not worried.”

“I…wow, what?” Sam blinked up at him disbelievingly, “ _Pardon?_ ”

He rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and in all honesty, Sam had expected him to keep his gaze there, if only continue going to great pains to keep from making direct eye contact with her. Instead, on the heels of another shrug, Chris looked down to her. “I mean, it is what it is, Sam. Cards on the table, I’m not always… _great_ with things like, uh, reading people. Or situations. _Especially_ these days. You, on the other hand…” His tone took on a jokingly scornful edge at that, “I don’t know who or what you made a deal with, but in case you hadn’t noticed, you have this like _supernatural_ ability to figure out when people are freaking out, and— _and!_ —you’re always ten freaking steps ahead in deescalating whatever the situation is.” He dropped his arms to his sides with a quiet, unimportant sound. “If _your_ Spidey sense isn’t tingling, then yeah, I-I’m gonna take your word for it.”

She blinked again. “…really?”

“Really.”

“Oh. Well. Cool.”

“Cool.”

They both continued to stand there, silently but thoughtfully sizing each other up. It felt like a moment of sorts (and a capital-M Moment, at that), a crossing of an unnamed and rickety bridge, an understanding neither had known they needed.

“Then I guess…we’re all set.”

“Guess so. Other than those dishes. Uh. Did you… _actually_ want help with those, or was that just a clever ruse?”

“Ruse, mostly. We have a dishwasher.”

“Oh thank _Christ_.”

The two of them laughed quietly, not wanting to be overheard. The door was thick, sure, but Ashley and Josh were _precisely_ the sort of people who had no real qualms with eavesdropping. _Especially_ if there was laughter involved. They seemed to have this thought at the same time, turning back to the door in unison and simply looking at it.

Setting her arms akimbo, Sam shook her head. “Think we should just hide out in here until they stop talking?”

Chris pantomimed wiping sweat from his brow, letting out a long, drawn-out ‘ _Phew!_ ’ of relief. “It’s like you’re a psychic! Yeah, I’m not going back out into that. You, uh, you know they could just do that for hours, right? We could, in theory, be here all night. Hiding in the kitchen. With nothing but…” he opened the refrigerator and scanned the contents, frowning dramatically. “Tomato juice and…man, that’s a lot of avocados, Sam. We’ll starve to death.”

“ _You’ll_ starve to death,” she corrected, taking the time to stick her tongue out at him. “ _I_ will _thrive_. I’ll be so full of Omega-3s.”

“I give you my full permission to eat my shriveled corpse once I finally go. I’m not organic, not grass-fed, and God knows I’m just _full_ of GMOs, but hey. Beggars can’t be choosers.” Something in the door of the fridge jingled when he shut the door again. “But for real, uhhh…thanks. For, y’know.” Chris shrugged for the umpteenth time, lifting his hands helplessly. “Everything.”

“Hey, no problemo. That’s what buds are for, isn’t it?” Playfully, she nudged him with her elbow.

“Yeah, well…yeah.”

Sam leaned in towards him conspiratorially, looking up at him through her eyelashes instead of craning her head upwards. “Is this the part where we hug?” she whispered.

He mirrored her posture and narrowed his eyes. “I’d rather not,” he said, his whisper significantly louder than hers. “I mean. Unless you want to. Do you _want_ this to be the part where we hug?”

Without missing a beat, she threw her arms out to her sides. “Bring it in.”

“Okay, all right, I guess we’re…guess we’re doing this, huh? God, why are you so _small?_ You’re like a fucking oompa loompa, I swear. Just don’t cop a feel and we’ll be fine.”

*******

**Thursday, July 31, 2014**  
**Afternoon**

“Should I take it that you had something of a long night?”

“Something like that, sure.” Damn, he hadn’t even felt it sneak up on him until Hill brought it up. It overtook him with all the suddenness of a heart attack; a huge, leonine yawn that caused a wildly unpleasant popping noise from his jaw. “All nighter.”

“Nightmares again?”

He snickered, mostly to himself, shaking his head. “Believe it or not…nope! I come bearing better news. Get this, I found myself in a _deep_ writing groove, thanks to the input of one little-miss-know-it-all, herself, and I rode that sucker for as long as I could. By the time it finally broke, it was like…” Josh sucked his teeth as he thought, eyes skating slightly to the left in an attempt to remember. “Well, it was _late_ , I can tell you that much. Or maybe it was early. I dunno. Shit’s relative, right?”

“That it is. That, it most certainly is.” Hill set his elbows on the desk and leaned into the wide distance separating the two of them. For whatever reason, it seemed so much _larger_ than it usually did. Probably he’d moved some papers around or cleaned something up. “Grogginess aside, how are we feeling today?”

“All in all? Nothing to complain about, I guess. Pretty decent.”

There was something steely in Hill’s eyes at that, a detached sort of disappointment. For the life of him, Josh couldn’t figure out what _that_ was all about, but there it was all the same, in bright Technicolor. By then it was a familiar look, like the teacher who knows you’re cheating. Like the parent who caught you lying. He’d just never seen it on Hill’s face before. Had he? He didn’t think so. As though able to hear his thoughts, Hill chose that moment to cast his eyes downward, examining nothing in particular, head cocked thoughtfully to the side.

Not a _great_ sign.

It took considerable effort for Josh to act as though he hadn’t noticed Hill’s doom _or_ his gloom. Shrinks were still people, after all, and people were prone to having off-days. “Yeah, stuff’s okay! Bob’s still off doing his movie thing, Linda’s off leading some board of professional women that do…well, okay, I don’t actually _know_ what it is that they _do_ , but they gotta do _something_ , right? So I don’t have to deal with their personal brands of bullshit, at the very least. It’s nuts, do you know that I’ve actually gone _two weeks_ without being yelled at for something? Dropping out or wasting my time or…shit, _anything!_ ” He laughed, making himself more comfortable. He let his legs dangle over one of the arms of the chair as he sat, maintaining his grin despite his uncertainty. “You, uh, don’t mind, do you?” he asked, gesturing vaguely to his legs with the hand holding his spoon. “I know it’s not the most _polite_ , but…”

Hill didn’t say anything, instead opting to wave his own hand in a gesture that managed to read ‘ _Of course, of course_ ,’ even when paired with the dour look on his face. The office wasn’t as well lit as it usually was, due in part to the overcast weather outside. The sunlight that _was_ filtering into the room seemed wrong, somehow, as though something other than the clouds was blocking it.

Weird, but not weird enough to bring him to swivel around in his chair for a better look.

Already, his cereal was getting soggy. He chewed through a mouthful, still anticipating… _something_ from Hill. “Is this a _test_ , Alan?” As soon as the thought crossed his mind, it took root. Josh felt his smile widen. He snickered and took another bite, shaking his head reflectively. “You just wanna see if I’m gonna babble about shit to fill the silence? Maybe let slip some huge, life-altering nugget of emotional turmoil in the process? Pretty crafty, I’ll hand it to you.”

And again…nothing. Not a damn fucking _thing_. If he’d been _anyone_ other than Josh-Wash, the up-and-coming prodigy of the horror world (“The _prince_ of horror,” Ashley’s voice reminded him somewhere in the back of his mind, “Born of the horror _king_ ”), he might’ve been tempted to say the whole situation was…creepy.

There was Hill, sitting across from him silently, all washed out and drab and looking like some shitty academic version of a ghost in his white dress shirt and grey sweater vest, skin pale, eyes paler, the dingy blue of his tie the only _real_ color on him. Folded hands, disapproving eyes, mouth pressed hard into a line that screamed more than suggested displeasure.

For _what_ , though? What was all of that _about?_

Josh found it difficult to maintain eye contact with him for more than a few seconds at a time. It was as though the longer he looked at him, the angrier Hill’s expression became. It was like…it was like one of those crappy Halloween decorations you could get at the mall—the oh-so-spooky portraits that changed when you viewed them from different angles. He had to fight the impulse to rock back and forth where he sat to test that theory.

It was more than the look, however. A lot more. He couldn’t place it, at least not all at once, but some strange combination of the dimness of the room, combined with Hill’s presence, and something…something else. But _what?_ The question prickled at his skin, making him itch. Something was off. Something wasn’t _right_ , something was…

Then it hit him. “Did you move the clock?”

There was a long, weighty silence on Hill’s end as he, ostensibly, processed the question. “I’m sorry?”

“The…the clock,” Josh said, pointing impatiently over Hill’s head. “Usually it’s behind me, somewhere. I can always hear it ticking but I don’t think I’ve ever actually _seen_ it.” He paused, frowning as something _else_ occurred to him. “Wait, did y…did you turn the desk around or something? Where’s that spooky-ass painting?” He took another bite of his cereal and relaxed back in the cushy chair, “If this is some redecoration thing, I gotta say, it’s a _real_ weird direction you’re taking it in.” The effect was _definitely_ disorienting. The painting was _always_ behind Hill’s side of the desk, wasn’t it? Of course it was, looming just behind him like some terrible specter.

Not now, though. Now it was the clock, and _fuck_ that was weird, wasn’t it? The clock itself was…hmm. Something about the clock was weird, too. Really weird. Really, _really_ weird, because…

His head was starting to hurt. He stopped looking at the clock. It didn’t matter. Fuck the clock. What was _really_ weird was how Hill wasn’t _answering the question_.

About ten steps past uncomfortable, Josh fixed his eyes on Hill’s. There was no way to resist the angry shudder that crept its way up his spine when he met his gaze. “Well?” he asked, waving his spoon accusingly. “That’s it, right? Some redecoration thing? Or is it another weird, like psych test? Am I supposed to spot all the differences or something? Will the number of things I notice tell you something about my childhood, Alan?”

“Joshua. You haven’t been taking your medication.”

He had put another spoonful of cereal into his mouth, but stopped crunching then, feeling the muscles in his face going warningly numb. “Huh. Well. Why would you think _that?_ ” His words were thick—almost unintelligible. The entire inside of his mouth felt coated in a film of gritty sugar residue as he struggled to swallow.

The corners of Hill’s eyes crinkled. His crow’s feet became impossibly deep chasms in the doughy expanse of his skin. “Let’s call it a hunch.”

It felt suddenly _imperative_ that Josh keep his eyes downturned. He sucked his teeth as he thought, absently tapping his spoon against the wide of his bowl. “Sort of a, uh, baseless accusation, then, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I think I have some grounds upon which to point fingers, actually.” His face barely moved, but Josh could _hear_ the sneer in Hill’s voice, lurking just under the surface like some sort of terrible eldritch monstrosity looming in the shadow, tendrils ready to grab and grasp and pull him down. “So?”

His throat felt very dry, even as he shoveled another spoonful of milk and cereal down. “So,” he parroted, trying desperately to find something ( _anything_ ) other than Hill to rest his eyes on. Another loud _tick_ caught him as though by divine providence, and it finally— _finally_ clicked into place, what had been bothering him so deeply about it. “Is that what that clock’s always looked like?”

There was a long, exasperated intake of breath from Hill. “…what?”

“Yeah, yeah, I just…is that what it _always_ looked like? I’m still _pretty_ convinced this is you trying to pull a fast one on me. Some abstract psychological shit. New age Rorschach test or something—I know your game, man.” He forced a smile, waving his spoon towards the clock. “There is _no way_ that’s the same clock that’s been in here for the past year.”

“You’re avoiding the issue at hand, Joshua.”

“Nah, I’m not, we’ll get to that. It’s just…it’s just the _weirdest_ fuckin’ thing, Alan—pardon my French. I just…I could _swear…_ see, I’d _know_ if that was the clock you’d had in here the whole time, because that that’s the same clock we got in our kitchen at home. Bet my _life_ on that shit.”

A grim smile tugged at the sunken corners of Hill’s mouth, giving him the look of some bloated undersea creature (the sort that hid in the dark, waiting to lash out when prey strayed too close). His eyes narrowed as he leaned in over the desk again, fixing Josh with a look that was caught halfway between amusement and pity. “Joshua…” he began slowly, “Just _where_ is it that you think we are?”

He paused mid-chew, reeling back in surprise. “What do you _mean_ where do I think we—” Josh glanced away from Hill’s face for a second—only a _second_ —to look at the clock.

There was a heavy sound when his bowl hit the floor, closely followed by his spoon; small cinnamon-y rivers of leftover milk flooded the divots in the grouting. He blinked hard once, twice, three times before rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands, chest growing tight and breath coming quickly. He rubbed until his vision filled with bright, sparkling stars, horrified of what he might see when his sight cleared again. Josh took a deep, deep, _deep_ breath, screwing up every ounce of his courage. He dropped his hands from his face.

His eyes found the clock, still ticking away like a solemn metronome. But when he moved his gaze downwards (slowly, so _slowly_ …), there was no Hill. There was no desk. He sat alone at the kitchen table, his heart pounding thickly in his throat.

He managed a quiet, “Oh fuck,” as he looked across the table, eyes tracing the empty space that Hill had been occupying only a second ago. With shaking hands, he pinched one arm, then the other, hoping against hope that this would prove to be just another nightmare, just another shitty fucking nightmare, and not the hallucinations the prescription bottle warned of. “Oh fuck,” he repeated weakly, the flesh of his arms growing red where he’d grabbed it, stinging in dull pulses. “Oh fuck _me_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys!!! Just a quick note here now that we're 10 chapters and 200k in to say, uh...thank you?? Thank you!!!! When I posted the first chapter (originally) in August of last year, I was absolutely PETRIFIED. I had been brainstorming the idea behind this fic for an embarrassingly long time (almost a YEAR), writing a few words here and there, not sure that I would ever get the courage together to do the dang thing and POST something. I hadn't dipped my toe into a new fandom in the longest time, ESPECIALLY not a horror fandom, and I had NO idea what to expect...
> 
> And I continue to be blown away every day that I wake up and see new hits/kudos/comments. For real! The thought that you guys are enjoying this little sometimes-funny, sometimes-dark, sometimes-spooky thing that I thought would always just live in my head is...so fantastic, I don't even have the words for it. So thanks a million times over for sticking with me throughout this MONSTER of a fic (lol), I'm so, so, so grateful for each and every one of you, and I hope from the bottom of my heart that you enjoy the ride as we get closer and closer to that snowy night on the mountain ;) You're the best!!!


	11. Where Josh and his thoughts are finally (alone)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Relevant warnings for this chapter: Body horror, just so much death talk, descriptions of gore, mentions of animal death, C O U C H E S, the author using the fic as a framing device to complain about writing in general. Also, another important note: Mental health/illness is obviously a big ol' part of the game, and therefore a big ol' part of this story. It's going to CONTINUE to be a big part of the story. Once again, I'm not a medical professional, please don't ever take the stuff I (or Dr. Hill, lol) say as medical/psychiatric advice/opinion. I'm just a simple woman writing a story about a spooky video game.

**Tuesday, August 5, 2014**  
**7:20pm**

> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **We need to go!**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB**  
>  **But—**
> 
> **MEAN GIRL**  
>  **GOD, will you just SHUT UP?! We CAN’T go, not until—**
> 
> **From behind them, there was a knock on the door. Not a little one, either. It was a big, loud, clunker of a knock, sounding like someone had slammed the other side of the door with a baseball bat instead of knuckles. It got their attention, making them all turn around at once.**
> 
> **But the door was just a door. A big, thick metal one. The same one that they’d watched ALPHA MALE disappear through earlier. It wasn’t rattling on its hinges and there wasn’t an axe chopping its way through it. Just a door. Still, they stared at it with wide eyes and pounding hearts, as though suspecting that it would lunge at them at any second. There was another knock, somehow even louder that time, and MEAN GIRL clutched a hand to the base of her throat.**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **Don—don’t!**
> 
> **MG approached the door quickly, face flushed with excitement and maybe relief. She knocked back, the sound so much smaller than the knocks they’d been hearing. That should’ve made her nervous, but it didn’t. She pressed her face to the door and called out.**
> 
> **MEAN GIRL**  
>  **AM? Is that you?**
> 
> **She tried the handle again, but it had been locked ten minutes ago and it was still locked then. She swore under her breath and tried again, putting more of her weight into it.**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB was suddenly nudged back to his feet, SCAREDY CAT doing her best to prop him upright.**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB**  
>  **What are you—**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **You need to get up. NOW. We need to get out of here.**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB**  
>  **Get out of h—AM’s right there! He needs our help, we can’t just LEAVE.**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **That’s not AM.**
> 
> **MG whipped around from where she’d been doing her best to tear the door’s handle off, eyes bright with righteous fury as she turned on them. She balled her hands at her sides, her face contorting into a scowl that even her caked-on makeup couldn’t make pretty. Her mascara had left dark tracks down her cheeks, giving her the general look of some snarling she-demon.**
> 
> **MEAN GIRL**  
>  **Oh no, you’re not going ANYWHERE! AM needs us! Get OVER HERE and help me get this fucking door open, NOW!**
> 
> **SC made it a point to not turn around to face her. She didn’t make eye contact with HD either, just kept trying to push him forward towards the stairs. She couldn’t have looked more different from MG in that moment if her life depended on it. Her face was the color of old cheese, her lips almost blue with cold and fear. When she spoke, her voice shook in a weird, vibrato sort of way that suggested she was trying very hard not to cry or scream or probably both.**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **It’s not him.**
> 
> **MEAN GIRL**  
>  **Stop being such a bitch! You’re going to just let him DIE?!**
> 
> **The knocking came from the door again, even louder than before. Bang! Bang! Bang!**
> 
> **MEAN GIRL**  
>  **AM! I can’t get it open!**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB**  
>  **SC, we need to—**
> 
> **Bang! Bang! Bang!**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **Keep moving. Keep moving. Just keep moving. Keep moving.**
> 
> **She managed to get HD walking towards the stairs, but slowly. So slowly. His head was still craned around to watch MG and the door, and it was obvious that he was giving SC’s pushing a fair amount of resistance. She didn’t relent, continuing to shove and shove him up onto the first step.**
> 
> **BANG!**
> 
> **MEAN GIRL**  
>  **AM!**
> 
> **BANG!**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB**  
>  **SC!**
> 
> **BANG!**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **IT’S NOT AM!**
> 
> **There was a beat between them, just the two of them, SC and HD, where they looked at each other. He was confused but she was not—no, there was a horrible knowing in her eyes, wide and brimming with tears. He turned his attention away from MG and the door fully, and that’s when he finally realized SC was hyperventilating. When she spoke again, it was in a choked whisper.**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **He locked the door behind him. On HIS side.**
> 
> **It took a second for it to actually process in his tired brain. When it did, though, he felt each of his organs fall down into his feet. Except for his heart, of course, which jumped right up into his throat.**
> 
> **BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG!**
> 
> **HAPLESS DWEEB**  
>  **Oh FUCK—**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **Run!**
> 
> **In almost perfect unison, they did just that, taking the stairs two at a time to try and escape. Behind them, the knocking got louder, and louder, and then there was a new sound. A worse sound. It was quiet at first, and then quickly became much louder: the screeching squeal of warping metal. The nails-on-a-chalkboard sound was punctuated by a scream from MG, whose footsteps were quickly heard right behind them.**  
>    
>  **BANG! SQUEAL!**
> 
> **BANG! SQUEAL!**
> 
> **BANG!**
> 
> **CLANG!**
> 
> **And then, the horrible sound of something large hitting the ground where they had only just been standing. And then, worse still, a fourth pair of footsteps behind them.**
> 
> **[END SCENE?]**

The stress ball flew into the air. It dropped back into his palm. He squeezed it once before tossing it upwards again. Each time it fell into his hand, it made a tiny, almost imperceptible _paf_ sound, entirely out of sync with the goddamn drone of the hold music. There’d been enough time for him to read over the scene _twice_ , so far, and it sure didn’t seem like anyone was in any sort of hurry to get back to him.

Fine. It was _fine_. Not like he was getting much done, anyway. Not when his brain kept flitting back to last week. To the kitchen. Ugh. He couldn’t get it out of his mind—a fact that seemed _particularly_ cruel, given that it wasn’t _ever_ going to _ever_ happen again _ever_. He’d be _careful_ from then on. More careful than he had been, at least.

It wasn’t that he had stopped altogether. He _never_ did that, not even with the others and their crap prescriptions. (Not even with the Fluoxetine, and that shit had made his stomach feel like he was eating and puking razorblades in an endless cycle.) He wasn’t a _moron_. He’d taken psych classes. So no, he hadn’t done anything stupid like flushing them or throwing them away, but _maybe_ he wasn’t taking them with, uh, any sort of regularity. That was a good way of saying it. Neat and tidy and elegant. ‘Not taking them with regularity.’ Yeah, that sounded okay. It had the type of professional heft that could come in handy if Hill grilled him on it. ‘Sorry Alan,’ he’d say with a sheepish smile and a shrug, ‘I guess I just wasn’t taking my meds with the regularity you would’ve liked.’

Sounded better than ‘I take them when I feel real, real bad, and then stop when I think I’m okay again.’ That wasn’t a professional answer. Wasn’t a _good_ one either. Made him sound a little bit like a kid who didn’t want to eat their veggies. And okay, maybe sometimes he _felt_ like he was behaving that way, but the simple fact was this: The meds were shit. They didn’t make him want to puke, and they _did_ seem to help when the nasty voice in the back of his head reminded him how nice and cozy it might be to be dead…but they _sucked_. They made him sleepy, made his thoughts a foggy mess. They made his head feel congested, cottony, like he was a stuffed toy instead of a living, breathing human being. He _needed_ his brain. He needed his wit and he needed his creativity, he needed all of that if he was going to stay sane. So when he started to feel as though he was losing himself, yeah, he stopped. But he _always_ started again when his skin seemed not to fit the right way, when he couldn’t wrench himself out of bed.

Didn’t really feel fair that Hill could lecture him even when he wasn’t in his office. So the…whatever it was (he didn’t like the word ‘hallucination,’ didn’t like the gravity that accompanied it, weighing him down like he was sinking into quicksand) was a one-off. Of that he was positive. He’d waited too long, hadn’t tapered himself enough before stopping the last time. To err was human, right? Well he’d erred for sure, and now his erring days were behind him. He was a man who learned from his mistakes, Josh Washington, or at the very least _acted_ like he did.

On the other end of the line, something clicked, making him sit up straighter in his seat…only for the hold music to begin another loop.

He groaned loudly and dropped his head onto the desk, narrowly missing his keyboard. This was infuriating. But again, _fine_. He could work around it. Hitting the speaker button, he set the phone down on the desk next to him, sitting upright once more; if they were going to pull this sort of shit, then he might as well try and force out a sentence or two.

The next scene was going to follow a jump-cut, he thought. The chase he’d just finished would stop so abruptly that the audience’s heads would _spin_ , and they’d find themselves thrown into an entirely different sort of situation. But _what?_ That was the question. Something with the Final Girl, probably, as it would’ve been a while since they’d checked in on her, and if there was _one_ horror movie rule anyone worth their salt knew, it was that you never kept the Final Girl off-screen for _too_ long. The audience needed her. She was the rock, the one you were rooting for. Where had he left her?

Josh clicked his tongue a few times as he scrolled upwards, skimming the patchwork series of scenes he’d gotten down so far. In the beginning, he’d set out to write this monster in perfect chronological order, but that had turned out to be _torturous_. Sometimes, he’d found, ideas would pop into his head so vividly and perfectly that he _had_ to get them down on paper _immediately_ before they could dissipate like the after-images of a dream. He’d been trying to keep them in order…for the most part.

Editing was going to be a bitch. The biggest bitch of them all.

Aha! Okay, the last time the audience had seen the Final Girl, she had run out to the car, realizing that the engine was fried. She was outside. All right, good, he could work with that. She would be trying to find the others as she wove her way slowly through the mansion’s grounds, doing everything in her power to _not_ be noticed by The Psycho, the masked madman who’d recently made his first appearance, and who she knew could be looming around any corner. He _wasn’t_ , of course, because he was about to make mincemeat out of the others, but how could she _possibly_ know that? She couldn’t. She’d be terrified, keeping herself low to the ground, calling out for her friends in a tense, hushed whisper. Her hair would be in her face, stuck there with sweat and the tiniest hint of blood. _Perfect_.

He had only finished half a sentence before the hold music wavered again, finally— _finally!_ —giving way to a human voice on the other end. “Okay, hi! Sorry for the wait. We’ve definitely received your PDF, and if you’re still interested, we should be able to have a ream printed for you in about a week.”

Josh shot the phone an exasperated look as he slid his fingers off the keyboard. “Uh, I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I just wanted to know if you could print _one._ ”

“One ream, right!”

“No, I—” He paused just long enough to put on his best customer service voice, forcing a smile into his words. “Sorry, I’m not looking for a whole stack of the things, I just want _one._ One singular paper. It’s for a prop mock-up, so I can see whether I _need_ a whole bunch or not. Can’t you—” He pulled a face as the person on the other end continued to explain that no, no, they didn’t _do_ that there, crossing his eyes and flapping his jaw in a crude mockery of their talking. Then he just sat back, leaning so far in his chair that its support creaked warningly and the front wheels hovered dangerously high up off the floor. “Uh huh,” he hummed, entertaining the bullshit they were spewing at him. “Yeah, yeah, fine. I get it. It’s not that big a deal. I’ll take a ream. You said it’s gonna take a week?” He scratched at an eye with his free hand as he listened again, checking his computer’s calendar, “Mhm, okay, yeah that’s fine. Yeah, it’s fine. The name? Uh…” He picked up the credit card lying on the desk, flipping it over to get at that sweet, sweet transactional info. “Washington Pictures. I—yeah, _that_ Washington Pictures. Uh huh. Oh yeah, it’s gonna be a fun one all right.” Josh resisted the urge to roll his eyes until he remembered the schmuck couldn’t see him; he rolled his eyes twice then, for good measure. “Yeah, the address is—”

It was hard to say what happened at that moment. Had anyone asked him, even _Josh_ wasn’t sure he’d be able to explain. The long and short of it was, he had an idea.

A good idea? Well, that stood to be seen. But an idea, nonetheless.

He glanced to the open document again, the cursor blinking right in the middle of the sentence, and realized the decision had already been made for him.

“Yeah, sorry about that, had to check my records real quick. You ready? Here’s the shipping address.”

***

**Monday, August 18, 2014**  
**4:43pm**

_The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Dark and deep, but…shit, no, lovely, dark and deep…but I have promises to keep. And…something something something sleep._

It had been jingle-jangling in his head like a pocketful of loose change ever since he’d stuck the note to the refrigerator that morning. He couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out what had triggered it—for fuck’s sake, he could only barely _remember_ it. Robert Frost; he knew that much. There had been some sad little emo girl in his freshman poetry course (what a way to work through the core credits, he thought in retrospect) who had been _obsessed_ with Frost to such an extent that she’d taken to decorating all of her notebooks with quotes of his, each carefully written out in different colors of permanent marker. She’d worn her hair like Beth’s; _that_ he knew too.

_‘Hey Ma—_ ’ Read the note taped above the ice dispenser, ‘ _Spending some time at the Hartleys’ before Chris goes back to school. Have my cell if you need. –J_ ’ The pen had bled through the paper a little bit, but that hadn’t really been his concern. No, his concern was whether or not Linda would actually _see_ the damn thing. He doubted it. Doubted it wholly. Nah, she wouldn’t’ve seen it even if he’d power-washed it into the siding of the house. There was no threat of her calling him (or, God forbid, Colleen and Al) because there was no threat of her stepping foot into the kitchen. Not with the way she avoided the house those days. Avoided it like _it_ was the haunted one.

And shit, maybe it _was_. Did you need ghosts for a haunting? Could living people haunt a place? He had a horrible, stomach-curdling suspicion that he didn’t want to tug too hard on _that_ particular string of thought, lest he realize that the Washington child haunting their home was, in fact, his-own-damn-self.

What kind of familial luck was _that,_ to have two distinctly cursed homes (even if they _were_ haunted in distinctly unique ways)? Hannah and Beth in Blackwood, him back home…well, the girls _had_ liked having their own space. Girl thing. Sister thing. Twin thing. It had always been that way, really, as far back as he could remember.

The two of them had shared a bedroom until it had gotten weird, shared clothes, shared secrets, shared friends, shared a womb, shared a fucking funeral. People even _talked_ about them like they were one entity: Beth and Hannah, Hannah and Beth, the twins. And there _he’d_ been, the odd man out, the island. It had always been ‘the girls and Josh,’ or ‘Josh and his sisters,’ or ‘the twins and their brother.’ Separate. Apart. Different. They had been a unit, attached at the hip, and he had been the one on the outside looking in.

It would only make sense, then, that they’d probably want to haunt their own place without having to worry about him cramping their style.

Josh snapped himself out of the rabbit hole he’d somehow fallen into, rubbing at his eyes tiredly before pulling his phone out and checking the time. It took him a second to remember exactly what it was he was supposed to be doing, and even then, the snippet of the damn poem came back to him, playing on a loop as though _specifically_ to muddle his thoughts.

_Dark and deep, dark and deep, dark and deep._

He was surprised and more than a little disappointed to realize he had to scroll a little in his inbox to find his thread with Chris. Had it really been _that_ long since they’d texted one-on-one? What was up with _that?_ Before he could think too deeply into it, he fired off a quick message.

He was surprised (and more than a little disappointed) to see how quickly he got a response. Chris _did_ always have his phone on him. Even if the people he was using it to text weren’t Josh.

 

Cochise  
  
weird question for u  
weird answer for you  
u think ghosts r real  
oh sure  
oh yea  
casper for one  
nearly headless nick  
he was cool  
uhhhh shit uh  
oh king boo  
and all the other boos OBVS  
kinda fucked up that classism even exists in ghosts huh  
like what makes HIM the king?????  
is he deader than the rest of them????  
OH  
the poltergeist from poltergeist  
thats a good one  
classic  
wait shit  
does danny phantom count  
he’s at LEAST half ghost right???  
dude seriously wtf of course ghosts aren’t real  
i mean unless danny phantom counts  
danny phantom does NOT count man  
then you have my answer  
i ain’t afraid of no ghosts because ghosts are fake as hell  
why you askin???  
random survey  
weird survey  
arent they all

Sounded about right. Chris was a ‘believe-it-when-I-see-it’ kind of guy, someone who needed stats and raw data to believe in something. On some level, Josh realized he had been expecting his answer to be comforting, like a long distance pat on the shoulder meant to reassure him that he wasn’t about to walk into anything he couldn’t handle—a pat on the shoulder Chris wouldn’t have known he was giving, of course. It didn’t have the intended effect. Instead of making him feel better about what he was about to do, something about the answer ruffled his feathers nearly to the point of making him itch.

After everything they’d been through, everything that had happened, how could he respond so flippantly? How did you crack jokes about Casper to the guy whose sisters were dead? They’d sat in the same room together _how_ many times since the twins had gone missing? Sometimes with Sam, sometimes with Ash, but _always_ with the heavy shadows of Hannah and Beth looming in the corners, on the empty couch cushions, just out of sight. Why was it so hard to believe that they were still _there_ , if not in body, then at least in some form of spirit?

Why was it always a fucking _joke?_ **  
**

When he glanced back down at his phone, he saw he had new notifications. He frowned, swiping to his texts.

 

Cochise  
  
hey but in all seriousness you doin ok man?

Loaded question, Cochise. Loaded fucking question.

Caught squarely between agitation and defensiveness, Josh scratched at his cheek, looking down at the text as one might look at an obviously cancerous growth.

 

Cochise  
  
hey but in all seriousness you doin ok man?  
u kno me  
livin the life of riley  
peachy keen  
copacetic  
right as rain  
chillin like a villain  
cold as ice bb  
cold as ice  
pff sure  
we should hang  
def  
free tonite?  
ash and jamie are comin for dinner

Of course they were. Real cute, real quaint.

 

Cochise  
  
ah sorry bro got a thing out of town  
raincheck tho  
well shit  
raincheck def  
we’ll figure it out  
enjoy visiting w ur mother in law  
you're literally the worst  
trust me man  
i kno

And with that, he tapped a button, darkening the screen once and for all. If there was _anything_ he didn’t need at that moment, it was the hollow itch of missing out. Not that he _was_ missing out. Not on anything important. He’d had dinner with the Hartleys hundreds of times in his life, dinner with Jamie, too. For a stretch in high school, it had been a weekly ordeal—hell, there’d been a _house rotation_ in order. So did it _matter_ that their families seemed to still be doing it? No. Did he _care_ that their families were still doing it? No. Meaning there was no reason to be upset. At all. Especially since everyone and their grandma knew they were just practicing for the eventual Hartley-Brown family holidays. Rehearsing for the wedding’s rehearsal dinner, if you will, har de har har _har_. They didn’t need him there for that. That much was abundantly clear.

He unbuckled his seatbelt and stretched his arms out to his sides with a pained groan. Leaning over, he grabbed his bag from the passenger seat and heaved it up to sling over his shoulder as he got out. The street was all but empty around him, and he shuddered against a chilly finger of anxiety at that. God, he fucking _hated_ being alone. This whole thing was a supremely shitty idea, the more he thought on it…

But he’d already taped the note to the fridge. And he still had…miles to go before he could sleep! That was it! _That_ was how the fucking poem went! It clicked in his head and he couldn’t help but grin. Of course it came to him—in the end, shit like that _always_ came to him.

Josh shut the door to his car, tapped the button on the key fob twice to lock it with a cheery chirp, and took a deep breath before walking up the concrete path.

_The woods are lovely, dark and deep,_ he thought silently, _But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. Miles to go before I sleep._ The journey had only started.

***

**6:11pm**

If his timing was right—and it usually was—the Hartley-Brown affair would be getting underway any second. Jamie and Colleen would be in the kitchen, both probably half through a glass of wine, gossiping about unimportant mom things. (You’ll never believe what so-and-so at work did. Know who I ran into at the store? Go on, guess. Can I just rant at you for a sec about something?) Al would be assailing a giggling Ashley with the same six jokes he’d been telling for the past ten years, and Chris would be trying his hardest to not to keel over from embarrassment, despite his own jokes being leagues worse.

Cute little family they’d make. Cute little family they’d _already_ made.

Once upon a time, it had been the Washingtons and the Hartleys. Then Bob had made it big, they’d moved into a bigger house in a swankier neighborhood, and the Browns had moved in from out-of-state. It had been the Washingtons, the Hartleys, _and_ the Browns for a hot second, but it hadn’t taken long for Bob and Linda to find new friends in the new neighborhood—ones in similar tax brackets with similar interests. It hadn’t _mattered_ by then, though, because even as gangly, socially stunted preteens, Chris and Ashley were already capital-I, capital-L, In Love, and _no one_ on Earth seemed to relish in that half as much as their parents.

Leaving _him_ on the outside looking in again. Well, okay, maybe not _outside_ -outside. Admittedly, if he took the time to step back from the dull ache of jealousy and look at the facts more objectively, he knew full well that both families _always_ had a place set for him if he wanted one, and it wasn’t as though they liked him _less_ for his parents’ absence. The gap they’d left was still there, and there were definitely those moments where he couldn’t help but wonder if Jamie and Colleen and Al rolled their eyes and waved their hands when they talked about Bob and Linda like he and Chris and Sam and Ashley talked about the dolts they went to high school with; the ones who disappeared off the face of the planet once they got to college, forgetting the good friends they had in favor of newer, shinier ones who had more Insta followers. He was never afraid they talked about _him_ that way, though. He was just afraid of the pity in their eyes. The way their smiles went soft around him.

The window vibrated against his head as he leaned against it, making the numbers on his phone screen seem to shake back and forth. If he texted Ashley right then and there, would she answer? Would she glance down at her phone and see his contact above the message, shove her phone back into her pocket, pretend that she hadn’t noticed until after dinner? If he asked her what he wanted to, what well-placed, outwardly innocuous questions would she ask Chris to try and weasel more information out of him?

One way to find out.

For the second time that night, he was surprised to see how quickly he received a response. Funny how people could pick and choose when they had time for you.

 

Ashley  
  
weird question for u  
Shoot!  
u think ghosts r real  
Uhhh…wow, when you said “weird question,” you meant it, huh?  
Why?  
jw  
Ughhhhhh I hate when you guys say stuff like that!  
It usually means you’re gonna make fun of me for it later.  
just curious ash  
i could make fun of u if u want tho  
say the word  
u kno im down to clown  
Ha ha haaaaaaa.  
Uh, okay, hmmm.  
It’s kind of a big question.  
not really  
ghosts real y/n  
fuckin circle one  
Well, personally, I think yes.  
If we say we understand everything about how the world works then like…we’re being super presumptuous.  
Too many people have too many stories and experiences with the paranormal for it to be totally bunk.  
Do I have any experiences like that? Maybe not, but like…every culture in the world has ghost stories, so…I think they’re probably real, sure.  
Now what’s the punchline?  
none  
already told u just lookin for opinions  
ty for ur input  
dont tell chris tho  
he will def make fun of u  
nonbeliever that boy  
Among other things.  
u can say that again kiddo

Again. No surprises.

If anyone had said it aloud, he would’ve pulled a face while making a noise—probably a gag, probably a _loud_ one, at that—but for all of their differences, he and Ashley had been friends for as long as they had been for good reason. It was something most people missed at first blush, to be _sure_ , at least until they squinted their eyes and really _searched_ for it. See, when you knew where to look, it became startlingly clear how very, very, very _alike_ the two of them were.

They had always been the same _sort_ of dork, the same _breed_ of intelligent. The topics they tended to fixate on were usually in the same vein. The windy grey landscapes of Gothic short stories, unsolved true-crime reports, indie tracks with hauntingly sad vocals, black olives and pineapple on pizza, drawing on their high-tops with gel pen, proving other people wrong, _Chris_ …And that was just the outward shit. That didn’t even touch on the abstract things like the daddy problems (which _neither_ of them discussed), the unexpected outbursts of detached rage (and wasn’t it funny how hers was seen as Ash Anger™, a cute little quirk, while his was just an unpleasant facet of his personality), and hoo boy, the other thing. The big one. The one that wasn’t spoken about under pain of death.

Ashley wasn’t depressed. That Josh knew for _damn_ sure. She wasn’t depressed, but she was… _something_. He didn’t talk about his, she didn’t talk about hers, and Chris—God bless him—pretended he didn’t notice either. But she was _something,_ that Ashley Brown, and while he had his theories, carefully patched together from years of evidence and more than his fair share of psych classes, there just wasn’t a way to confirm any diagnosis. Chris never wanted to run those hypotheticals with him. Nah, he’d typically roll his eyes or half-cover his ears and mutter something to the tune of ‘Maybe we _shouldn’t_ go around trying to psychoanalyze our friends, huh? _Huh?_ ’ until Josh gave up.

That was part of the problem, too. As quote-unquote creatives, they certainly both had imaginations vivid enough to get them in trouble. It was easier to convince yourself of shit when your brain was constantly running through potential scenarios, planning out plot points and outlining a million separate ideas that would likely never see the light of day. Easier to _believe_ in shit, too. Ghosts? Sure. Aliens? Definitely. True love? World peace? Time travel? Vampires? Elvis partying it up with Jimmy Hoffa somewhere in the deep woods of Pennsylvania with Bigfoot? All plausible _enough_. If Chris needed to see proof of something to believe in it, then Josh and Ashley needed to see proof _against_ something to _doubt_ it.

He bet his left foot _she_ wouldn’t have accompanied him on this trip if he’d paid her a cool million. Maybe not even _two_. Why was _that?_ Simple. Those hundreds of subtle similarities aside, the things that set them apart were just bigger. Louder.

Namely, she was scared of everything. Every-goddamn-thing. When shit hit the fan, Ash crumpled. It was just what she _did_. She cowered, she cried, she froze. Anger was her _second_ course of action—the path she took when panic wasn’t enough. As of late, that had _really_ been fraying his nerves. Fear didn’t serve any _purpose_ , it didn’t help you do jackshit. Anger was…

But of course, he’d already gone over that one. He hadn’t been lying to Sam when he told her ( _promised_ her, really) that he was _working_ on his own. He was. He seriously _was_. That didn’t change the fact that anger was more productive. When you were pissed, you got that adrenaline flowing, baby! Wasn’t spite one of history’s greatest motivators, after all? ‘Hell hath no fury,’ etcetera, etcetera. Now, true, you couldn’t _rely_ on anger, it couldn’t be your _only_ route, that shit wasn’t healthy, but…but at the end of the day, it was better than _fear_. Being a monster was safer than being a coward.

He checked his phone to see if Ashley was going to continue the conversation. It seemed she wasn’t. And why would she? He’d asked his question, she’d answered, the transaction was complete. _She_ didn’t ask if he was okay. The thought didn’t sting, funnily enough; instead, he couldn’t contain the distant pang of suspicion it inspired. The only time Encyclopedia Brown didn’t ask questions was when she already knew the answers.

Josh didn’t like the thought of that, but there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot he could do about it just then. So he set his head against the window, stared at the scenery as it flew by, and after ten minutes of seeing nothing particularly interesting, he pulled out his laptop and attempted to write _something_. Miles to go, and all that.

***

**9:50pm**

It struck him all at once that he hadn’t seen any roadkill in a long, long time. A suspiciously long time. When he’d set out on his little vacation, he’d seen a fair bit of it out on the side of the road, lumps of fur that could’ve been anything, raccoons flat out on their backs with their mouths open and uncomfortably human hands reaching for nothing at all, deer sprawled out with necks that twisted into unnatural shapes. As he stared out the window, though, it occurred to him that the last dead animal he’d seen (or taken notice of) had been a good two hours back, when he’d still been on the road.

Weird. Fucking _weird_. He would’ve thought there’d be _more_ out there, given the terrain. It should’ve been a veritable graveyard of sad fuzzy corpses, gathering flies and crows and—oh. Shit, yeah, no, okay, that made sense.

He rolled his eyes at his own idiocy, letting his head conk back against the seat as he continued watching the world slowly drift by. There were absolutely more animals out that way. So it stood to reason there were more _scavengers_ out that way. More _predators_. What big, hungry thing was going to turn down a meal that easy to just nab and run off with? Was roadkill the animal equivalent of takeout? Probably. Unbidden, an image flashed in his mind’s eye—a giant, honkin’ Chipotle burrito with a fat, shiny, _wriggling_ possum tail hanging out of it. He gagged audibly, shaking himself out with a grimace.

Then, as though by the divine providence of a greater, higher, cosmic force (the one in charge of making sure cute lil’ critters like that were _not_ shoved into burritos, even in daydreams), his phone lit up with a rapid flurry of texts from Sam. It was like she _knew_. Like she _knew_ he was thinking about roadkill. He watched as his phone continued to flicker with incoming messages, each time adding a number to the display: **almosts – 4 new messages, almosts – 5 new messages, almosts – 6 new…** He unlocked his phone to see what the damage was, quickly realizing it was really only _one_ message from Sam.

 

almosts  
  
sammy  
Oh man I was going through my phone and I dont know how I never sent these!!

What followed was a series of photos—a few clearly from Ashley’s grad party (including one _tragic_ shot of Chris mid-blink), a couple from the night of the twins’ birthday, and then a smattering from times he couldn’t place off the top of his head.

The thread continued to move underneath the photos as Chris and Ashley responded, his phone letting out a tiny tone each time any of them said anything. Josh leaned back in his seat, head still against the window as he watched the messages pile up. Part of him wanted… _shit_. Part of him wanted to join in like a normal goddamn person. He wanted to make fun of the weird faces they were making or how bad Sam was at getting shots in-focus. For once, for fucking _once_ , he wanted to be able to compartmentalize all of this shit, to tuck it away in a cramped box somewhere near the very back of his brainstem, to separate his emotions into neat categories before untangling them from the gnarls they’d managed to twist themselves into.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. That was the crux of the issue, wasn’t it? That was what Hill was always on his ass about. _Why_ couldn’t he just _do it?_ Normal people laughed with their friends about this stuff. They didn’t ping-pong back and forth between seething fury and cool detachment like he did. When normal people forgave, they _forgave_ , but when he tried it, the words always caught in his throat.

What was wrong with him? Why was he doing this— _any_ of this? Why couldn’t he be normal? Why couldn’t his fucking _brain_ work like it was supposed to?

He took in a long breath, shakier than he would’ve liked it to be, before setting his phone facedown on his lap. Outside, the surroundings were beginning to look exceptionally familiar. Time was running out. It made him feel very much like a kid being dragged to the dentist’s office. Each step forward was bringing him that much closer to something uncomfortable, if not downright painful. The note was hung on the fridge, he had a bag of snacks next to him, and he had miles to go before he could sleep, so it didn’t matter how unpleasant it was going to be. There was certainly no going back.

He flipped his phone over again and tapped out of the group text, opening his thread with Sam instead. There would be plenty of time to dwell on those other issues later. Hell, maybe he’d even take notes to bring to his next session with Hill. Stranger things had happened, after all.

 

sammy  
  
nice pics  
really captured my good side  
He says as though its hard to do  
samantha  
im flattered  
u do kno all my angles tho  
v impressive  
but hey  
weird question for u  
All of your questions are weird  
I think I can take it ;P  
Whats up  
u think ghosts r real  
Oh for sure  
didnt even need to think on that huh  
i like that  
What can I say Im an opinionated woman  
Know what I know and thats all that I know  
u ever see one  
Ooooooooh no  
Nonononono Im not touching that one  
Not with a ten foot pole  
is that a yes  
Thats a I know you too well to say anything about it one way or another  
omg thats a yes  
spill the deets sweetpea  
dont keep a guy waitin  
:|  
Look I dont like talking about this stuff  
Seriously gives me the heebie jeebs ech  
You have your answer  
Now YOU answer a question for ME  
if its not ghost related forget it  
:P  
Whatre you doing tomorrow  
Any interest in hanging out

He stared out the window again, resisting the overwhelming impulse to bang his head against the glass until it shattered.

 

sammy  
  
sammy  
ur KILLING me  
Uh  
Sorry I asked  
u could def say im interested  
and if ud asked a few hours ago  
well  
shit would b diff but  
im outta town  
family thing  
Aw bummer :(  
Anything fun at least  
i guess well see  
How long you gonna be out there do you think

Loaded question, he thought to himself again, trying to shake off the creeping feeling of déjà vu. Real loaded question, Sammy.

 

sammy  
  
How long you gonna be out there do you think  
not sure  
depends  
Ah the joy of family events  
You could always bail if it turns out to be a snoozefest  
And Im gonna have my phone obviously in case you need distracting  
The only thing Im doing for the next few days is HOPEFULLY finishing my last min dorm shopping  
need this seasons hot shower caddy  
Well duh ;P  
Dont want anyone to confuse me for a lame freshman after all  
no easy mac for u huh  
stock up on uh  
idk granola bars  
how do u manage  
You know me  
Adaptable Sam thats what they call me  
Im like Bear Grills  
Gryls?  
You know the one  
yea the dude who drank his own pee  
maybe not the best comparison  
Oh ew  
Forgot about that  
Yeah bad comparison uhhh so maybe more like…  
grizzly adams maybe  
never drank his own piss  
not to my knowledge at least  
Works for me

The engine gave a heavy chug, bringing his gaze back up. It was now or never.

 

sammy  
  
mk gtg  
ttyl  
Okay have fun if you can  
You sure youre gonna be ok :(  
always am arent i

And with that, he jammed his phone into his bag, letting it fall amid the rest of the shit he’d packed away. It was only a minute or two later that the world outside the window stopped moving and he was able to get to his feet. He hoisted his pack over his shoulder, grabbed the plastic bag of groceries he’d stocked up on, and fumbled with the latch of the door before disembarking.

Had he expected this to feel a certain way? It sure didn’t feel like coming home. Didn’t quite feel like going to the dentist either, on second thought. It felt…like maybe he’d fallen asleep a few miles back and now he was walking into a dream. He knew the places, had seen them a million times before, but none of them seemed solid—almost as if his hand would push through anything he tried to touch. Even as the wet ground squelched under his boots, he found himself wondering whether the world would open up and send him tumbling down into nothing, stopping only once he jerked awake.

The ground held up.

Josh climbed the stairs to the front door, peering around for a second before his eyes fell on it. He bent down and grabbed the package right where the twine securing it formed an X, scooping his fingers under and trying to lift it that way. It didn’t quite work as anticipated. Shit, why hadn’t they warned him newspapers were so _heavy?!_ The unexpected weight of the package threw him off-balance, and he had to pinwheel his other arm to keep from falling flat on his face, the bag of groceries smacking against the door with enough force to make him worry _something_ had gotten crushed; a truly graceful display, if ever there was one. When he righted himself again, he grumbled a few choice words under his breath and simply pushed the paper-wrapped ream away from the door with the side of his shoe. That was a problem for Tomorrow-Josh. Tonight-Josh was a little too tired to be assed with heavy lifting.

All Tonight-Josh wanted to do was get back inside, maybe take a shower, curl up in bed, and sleep until the afternoon. A doable prospect.

He stared at the front door for another second or two, giving the lanyard around his wrist a few twirls. It would wrap its way around his hand, the keys would bounce, and he’d reverse the direction to wrap it again. In the distance, some bird let out a trilling, sleepy call that reminded him vaguely of his cellphone. Josh set his hand on the doorknob, mouth pressed into a thoughtful shape as he tentatively unlocked the door and pushed it inwards.

“Hello?” He called into the darkness. “ _Hellooo?_ ” His own voice bounced back to him, quieter and smaller, but still loud enough to make sound as though he was, in fact, being greeted. The thought didn’t exactly make him smile.

There was a faint jingle when he tossed his keys onto the nearby accent table, sliding his feet out of his shoes without bothering to unlace them. He took a deep breath in and immediately choked on the dust, coughing out great, gusty lungfuls of air until he saw spots. Smacking his chest with the heel of his hand, he eventually got over the worst of it, pulling in a few shorter breaths while blinking through the watering of his eyes.

“ _Fuck!_ ” he muttered, hunching himself over with his hands on his thighs until he was on the other side of it, heart slowing back down and breathing returning to normal. He stood again, pausing only long enough to hitch his bag higher on his shoulder, walking out of the foyer in five long, confident strides. “ _Hello?_ ” He tried again, shouting at the very top of his lungs, amplifying it further by cupping his hands around his mouth, “ _Anybody hoooome?_ ”

No one answered.

Except for the ghosts, Blackwood Pines was empty.

*******

**Tuesday, August 19, 2014**  
**11:09am  
**

The walk was shorter than he remembered it being last time.

Then again, last time he’d had three other people in tow, and they’d somehow been walking into the wind both ways. Or at least so it had seemed. Memory was weird like that—picking and choosing what got stored accurately and what got thrown away, what got blurry and what sprouted venomous fangs. As the thin layer of icy mud squished under his boots, he could so _clearly_ remember his own fury, the way his chest had felt full of those awful burrs that sometimes fell from the tree in the backyard, clinging to his ribs and threatening to puncture his lungs and heart and whatever other fleshy things were hiding in there. He could remember how numb the cold had made his face. Each agonizing pulse of that monstrous hangover, the stabbing pain in his sinuses, the way he’d had to stop and dry heave into the sink twice once they’d arrived, all of that shit was still _there_ , almost as if it had never actually _left him_ , but had instead been lurking in the trees, waiting for his return.

What he couldn’t remember, he’d quickly realized, was the others. They’d been _there_ , sure, always behind him, yet in the vast expanses of his mind palace, they may as well have been mannequins. Had they talked about anything? If they _had_ , would he have been able to hear them over the screaming wind? Someone had been as sick as him, hadn’t they? It had been a real rough day for…who? Shit, it had been someone, hadn’t it? Had they fought?

Probably.

Probably they had fought. But when he tried to think on that, all he could remember was being out on the cliff, shouting into the wilderness until he could feel the cords of his neck standing out. That had been a different day, he thought. …Right? It had to have been, because what he’d been screaming over and over was ‘ _My sisters are DEAD, my sisters are fucking DEAD!_ ’ If he pushed his tongue back, real far back, almost to the point of choking, he imagined he could feel the gouges those screams had left there; permanent, ineffable scars, like the grooves of an old vinyl record. He wouldn’t have been yelling that on the first day. There had been too much _hope_ on that first day. People didn’t just die overnight, after all.

Especially not your baby sisters.

His hands were jammed into his pockets, and though it was the warmest part of the year the mountain would see, his breath still fogged the air in front of him as he walked. The music from his phone was just loud enough that someone standing next to him might’ve heard an occasional tinny snatch of a melody from his headphones, but it was far from blaring. It wasn’t wise to walk around the forest without all of your wits about you…and still, he had made it all of five minutes before folding. If it had been silent—well and truly _silent_ —then maybe he could’ve dealt with it. As if. The woods were _never_ fucking silent. There was always some bird tweetle-de-deeing its ass off in a tree, sticks were always cracking, animals were always chittering as they searched for something warm to hump, and if you paid attention to every tiny sound, you started wondering what _else_ was living out there beyond the trees. You started wondering how big their teeth were.

More to the point, the shit in his own head was quickly becoming deafening. Not just the usual bullshit back-and-forth conversations either (again, had it just been that, he could’ve dealt with it, he really could’ve). Had he been able to pick and choose, he would’ve given his own left hand to play through the ‘Old Favorites’ reel in his head: _Aw shit oh man that’s a plot hole huh? How do I fix THAT? I locked the door right but who cares I’m out in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, what, is someone gonna sneak UP THE MOUNTAIN to go through our shit? Goddamn my legs hurt I’m out of shape how did I do this last year how did CHRIS and ASH do this last year how did any of us do this last year?! Sammy makes sense, Sammy’s in shape, Sammy’s_ definitely _in shape if you get what I’m sayin’ hee-hee-fuckin-hee._ The normal shit. The regular shit.

That wasn’t what he was _getting_ , though. Nope, ol’ WJOSH wasn’t playing any of the golden oldies today. Instead, his signals had managed to crisscross each other, resulting in a jerky, repetitive remix that absolutely _no one_ had requested, but the DJs kept playing on loop.

_The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and are you still asleep? Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines, dark and deep, dark and deep. Miles to go before I sleep. Promises to keep, Frére Jacques, the woods are dark and deep and you’re still a-fucking-sleep._

So headphones it had been. If he got mauled by a bear or accosted by a pack of wolves, well, at least he wouldn’t be the only Washington lost up there. ‘Mount Washington,’ naturalists and tour guides would say with broad sweeping gestures, ‘So-named because three-fifths of the Washington family has been buried up here. Yes, _that_ Washington family! Such a tragedy. Money enough to buy a mountain, still not enough to keep their children alive. Sad tale, to be sure. Now, if you’ll look to your right, we have some more big-ass trees.’

When he finally reached the guest cabin, he wasn’t shocked to see the flimsy snake of police tape winding its way up a nearby tree. But ‘not shocked’ and ‘totally fine with’ were two _exceptionally_ different emotions; he tore it off as best he could, letting it flutter to the ground in ribbons.

Had it been there for the girls, he thought he would’ve kept it up. It would’ve felt wrong somehow, sacrilegious, to destroy anything that had been put there in an effort to find them. It _hadn’t_ been for the girls, and he knew that without the barest hint of doubt. _That_ was about the hiker they’d been talking about on _Radio From the Pines_. The one who went and got himself fucking _eaten_ by something bigger than him. Eaten and ripped apart like the carcass of a Thanksgiving turkey.

He shuddered subconsciously, reaching up and pulling his headphones off, simply letting them hang around his neck. From where he stood on the lawn, he couldn’t hear anything big _or_ hungry, be it a bear, wolf, or other beastie, so he snickered at himself to chip through the tension. “Did you miss me?” he asked the cabin, pulling his lanyard out. “Can’t say _I_ missed _you_ …kind of a one-sided relationship we’ve got going on, huh? Don’t you worry, I’m getting pretty used to those, so I won’t hold it against you.” He patted the doorknob before turning the key. The door was swollen sticky from the changing temperatures, so he had to put his shoulder into the effort, but with a quiet groan of complaint, it swung open easily enough. He left it ajar for a moment despite his earlier bear concerns, having no real desire to choke on the dust like he had the night before.

Josh stood there in the doorway, fingers moving to wrap around the shoulder traps of his bag, and he simply…looked. If he concentrated hard enough, really engaged that imagination muscle of his, he could very nearly see the shadows running around, tracing the paths the four of them had taken all those months ago. There was Sam, fixing a fire in the grate. There were Chris and Ashley, making a beeline for the bedroom (it _had_ been one of them who was sick, he remembered. Probably Chris. Probably one of those headaches he got…but it easily could’ve been Ashley’s hangover. It didn’t really matter, did it?). And there _he_ was, tearing through every nook and cranny like he was giving the Tasmanian Devil a run for his money.

An earlier thought of his occurred to him again: Maybe you didn’t need to be dead to haunt a place. Maybe the living could be ghosts, too.

God. If he ever said that shit out loud, Hill (the real one and the not-so-real-one alike) would probably jizz his pants.

He was chuckling again before he knew it, and just like that, the shade seemed to lift from the cabin. Josh took it as a sign and shut the door securely behind him, abruptly muting the ambient sounds of the forest. He didn’t bother locking the door, instead setting about making himself comfortable. A plume of dust rose up from the couch as he tossed his bag onto it. “Fuckin’ nice.” He waved a hand uselessly through the cloud in an attempt to disperse it. “Note to self: Dirt Devil. Dust Buster. _Something_.”

The cabin was chilly but not exactly _cold_. Regardless, Move #2 for the J-Man was to start up a fire. Call it a _cro magnon_ instinct. Fire good. Fire safe. Fire _cozy_. So he threw a few of the stacked logs into the grate before getting back up to rifle through his pack for a lighter. Once it was lit and crackling, he found himself at an impasse. What to do…what to do?

There was, unsurprisingly, nothing in the fridge. The pantry was another story entirely—he swung the doors open to reveal a tin can of sweet corn, two packets of taco seasoning, a box of bran flakes that had every appearance of having survived the Cold War, and…a mop. Delicious. “Oh thank God,” he intoned flatly, surveying the spread laid out in front of him. “Supplies enough to last the winter. Excellent.” He let out a deep exhale as he closed the doors again, trying and failing to push away the thought that rose to the top of his memory in much the same way corpses had a tendency to buoy up to the surface of a lake.

They’d hoped, all that time ago, that the twins would’ve been hiding out there in the cabin. The cabin where they would find blankets and fire and water. And food.

The bedroom smelled just as choked and dusty as the lodge had, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to spend too much time in it until he could air it out properly. Like a soldier on the gravest of missions, he forged forward into the bathroom for the most important inspection of all. Taps ran. Toilet flushed. That was all he needed.

He stopped halfway out of the bedroom, promptly turning back around to rummage through the old cedar chest in front of the bed. The blankets inside were gloriously free of dust or mold or whatever else could’ve infected them out there in the wild (mildew? bugs? squirrel shit? ancient curses?). Perfect. He grabbed the one on the top, an awful red-white-and-blue number that, if memory served, Chris’s mom had made back when he only stood about knee-high. He made his way back to the main room and threw it over the couch as a sort of barrier against whatever the fuck was festering inside of it. “Good enough, I guess.”

Setting his bag down onto the floor, he pulled his laptop out and opened it, stretching his legs across the couch as he did so. There, in the quiet of the cabin, sitting nice and toasty in front of the fireplace, he let his eyes skim what he’d been able to get out during yesterday’s bus ride.

> **The back room was quiet except for a clock. The cheap, chintzy sort, it sounded like, each “tick” too loud and metallic. FINAL GIRL suspected it was wrong, too, though she couldn’t begin to figure out whether that meant it was fast or slow. She lifted her wrist to check her watch and realized for the first time that night that it had stopped just past 6:30am. Dawn.**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **Shit.**
> 
> **She patted around her jacket until she found…nothing.**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **Oh double shit.**
> 
> **Of course she’d lost her phone. Of course she had. It only made sense, she’d been on the run for the better part of the night, having to duck and dodge to get away from THE PSYCHO. It had probably fallen out of her pocket…where? At the house? On the trail around back? In the parking lot outside of the police station? Didn’t matter. It was gone, baby, gone. Fuck. Her parents were going to kill her.**
> 
> **ALPHA MALE**  
>  **What?**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **Huh? Oh. Nothing. Just. Nothing. Sorry. Talking to myself I guess. Long night.**
> 
> **MEAN GIRL**  
>  **Yeah, no SHIT long night. God! I just want to go HOME! Why are they even keeping us here?! Are they even DOING anything?! We can’t just sit here with that maniac still out there! He could bust through the door at any second and—**
> 
> **ALPHA MALE**  
>  **MG, just chill, okay? Fuck’s sake.**
> 
> **MEAN GIRL**  
>  **Chill? CHILL?! Oh, you are not telling ME to CHILL! You know what? Fuck you! Fuck you, AM! Do you even—**
> 
> **As quietly and sneakily as she could with her injured leg, FG crept out of the room, entering the dimly lit hallway. She could hear the faint sound of radio static and low voices from behind one of the doors, doubtlessly where the cops were trying to draw up their own plan. Part of her wanted desperately to storm in there, throw the doors wide and just lay down the law herself. She was the one who’d been through it, she was the one who’d experienced it, she didn’t deserve the disbelieving looks they’d given her. Admittedly, her story had been bonkers, but it had been the same as the others’ stories. They’d all seen him. They’d all seen what he’d done. They’d heard the screams and smelled the blood, and…**
> 
> **If she kept thinking about it, she was going to barf again.**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **Keep it together…keep it together…keep it t—AGH!**
> 
> **She reeled back defensively, bringing her fists up as though preparing to strike, only to be met by SCAREDY CAT. Eyes wide, SC removed her hand from FG’S shoulder, holding both of her hands up in front of her face instead.**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **I’m sorry! Sorry, sorry! I’m sorry! I just—**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **Jeez!**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **Sorry!**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **It’s…it’s fine. It’s fine, SC, just…I don’t know, make more noise next time, okay? We’re all kind of jumpy, if you hadn’t noticed.**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **I know, I know…I…sorry.**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **It’s fine. What’s up? Need something?**
> 
> **SC looked bad. Real bad. Worse than she usually did, and that was saying something. The thick grime on her face had been cut through by shiny tear tracks, giving her the appearance of the world’s most depressed clown. Her eyes were still so wide, so glassy, that FG suspected she could probably see her reflection in them if she got close enough. The worst of it was how SC was shaking. It made her look like a kicked puppy. Except a kicked puppy could still bite if it needed to—SC was way too far-gone for that, FG thought. SC’s biting days were over. Probably forever.**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **Um…do you…have you checked your phone in the past few minutes?**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **Wh…no?**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **You should.**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **Can’t. I lost it. Great end to a great night, huh?**
> 
> **SC seemed to consider her for a second, face an unmoving mask. Shock and grief had rendered her little more than a talking department store dummy. Slowly, she reached into her own pocket, pulling her phone out. She looked down at it as though it was some terrible, flesh-eating beetle before extending it out towards FG.**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **You…you need to see something.**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **What?**
> 
> **FG didn’t want to see whatever it was. Her throat felt dry. Scratchy. She didn’t reach for the phone. She couldn’t make her arm move.**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **Tell me what it is.**  
>    
>  **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **…I’m sorry.**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **What?**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **I’m…I’m sorry about what happened to him. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything earlier, it’s just—**
> 
> **As her voice trailed off, FG just blinked. She felt her face go pale and cold.**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **What does that have to do with THIS?**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **FG, please—**
> 
> **FINAL GIRL**  
>  **What does this have to do with him?!**
> 
> **SCAREDY CAT**  
>  **FG—**
> 
> **She took the phone in one quick swipe, feeling the breath catch in her chest as she |**

For the better part of ten minutes, his fingers hovered over the keyboard, poised and ready…but nothing came. Not a single word.

And that…that was when something tipped the scales in his brain and everything went askew. Had Hill been there, he probably would’ve called it a ‘breakthrough.’ Safe to say _something_ broke through the carefully constructed wall he’d been building for the past week. Without any warning whatsoever, no flashing lights or sirens, Josh got angry.

Not frustrated, not mad, not peeved or ticked off or pissed or up in arms or any of those banal throw-away words—no. _No._ With all the suddenness of a switch being flipped, he realized he was fucking _furious_. The sort of righteous rage the old poets wrote about, the red-hot, violent frenzy of the cornered and the desperate. **  
**

He slammed the laptop shut and dropped his head into his hands. He knotted his fingers deep in his hair. He stared down at the ugly rug his mother had _insisted_ on putting under the couch because it ‘pulled the room together.’ He felt his heart hammering away in his throat. He felt his lips pull away from his teeth. He fumed.

The whole reason he’d come to the Pines in the first place was to get some clarity. To find some peace and quiet while he wrote his…whatever it was supposed to be. Magnum opus? (Could it even _count_ as that, given it had been all but _assigned_ to him?) It was supposed to bring him closer to the girls while pushing him further from his parents, further from the damned house, further from Hill and his pristine office… _further_ , period.

There were no distractions to keep him from his project, so why couldn’t he just _do it?!_ It wasn’t like he had homework to worry about, and sure as shit no one was going to knock on that door to ask if he was okay or if he wanted to talk about his feelings. It was just him and his thoughts out in the woods. So why was nothing happening?

Sure, maybe it was the meds. They fogged him up. And yeah, getting the words out had been _easier_ when he was off them, but _surprise!_ Turned out it was kind-of-sort-of difficult to do much of _anything_ once you knew your brain might go and manifest some fleshy specter of your goddamn shrink if you went too long without your happy pills. Wasn’t _that_ a fucking laugh.

And okay, fine, maybe holing himself up in the middle of nowhere, _alone_ , in a place where a few people had ‘mysteriously gone missing’ wasn’t the most conducive environment for mental clarity, but it had worked for Jack Torrance, hadn’t it?! He’d at least managed a few pages before he went full mental jacket.

It could’ve been that shit. Sure. Whatever. It _could’ve_. But it wasn’t, and Josh _knew_ it.

The dirty truth of it all was that everything on the God-forsaken property reminded him of them. Everything. Every single tiny, insignificant thing. Those memories were what he’d hoped would inspire him; he was coming to realize, perhaps too late, that that wasn’t exactly how grief worked. His head wasn’t filling with brilliant ideas for how to connect his scenes or even how his victims would die. All he could see, all he could think about, were the skeletons found on the mountain.

No flesh, no fat, nothing. Had they been eaten, or had they starved? Had it been _both?_ What sort of God would let _that_ happen—a human withering to death slowly, so _slowly_ , only to finally be torn apart by something bigger and stronger, starved mad by the cold? What kind of world was _that?_ Who was writing _that_ horror movie?

What did that mean for the twins? Was that what had happened to them? Were they the next to be chipped out of the permafrost, shriveled bones rattling around loosely in yoga pants and boots, clutching onto one another in one last desperate attempt to get warm? To find comfort?

He kept seeing the horrible image of that girl in Hill’s painting. The one who was tearing her own rib cage open. The one who was little more than a sack of skin stretched tight over avian-weak bones, her dark hair falling out in patches, her veins blue and full of slow-pumping sludge, her milky white eyes rolling back as she screamed in perfect agony.

Would the girls be screaming when their bodies were found?

Would the medical examiner hold his hat in his hands as he told them all that they had both starved to death out there in the cold?

Would something have been desperate enough to take a bite out of them, slicing through the meat of their calves and arms and bellies with yellowed teeth?

Would they look like the girl in the painting?

In his mind, they already did.

When he came back to himself, he was pacing the cabin, hands still tangled in his hair and breath coming in sharp bursts. He knew without knowing that it was gonna go until it stopped. Just like that, he was one of those shitty toy cars he and Chris used to play with out on the driveway—he’d been dragged back and back and now this had to run its course until his wheels stopped turning on their own. So he paced. _Just call me the Energizer Bunny_ , he thought to himself without the slightest trace of humor. He just kept going and going and going and going…

Until he stopped in front of the couch, more or less where he’d begun. Some sort of cosmic poetry, huh? Stopping where he started, and all that. Or, more likely, there simply wasn’t that much room to wander.

Josh took a deep breath in as he looked over the damage. Laptop on the floor. Actual footprints cutting a path through the dust like in some kids’ cartoon. He brought his hands down to rub at his eyes, pressing down until the backs of his eyelids lit up with dancing stars. It was right about that time he realized he was crying.

Day just got better and better.

But he was alone in the cabin, save for the imprints of him and his friends, so he let it run its course, cheeks burning lava-hot, eyes raw and itching. When it was all said and done, he didn’t feel _better_. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Lighter, though? He thought that was fair to say. Lighter. The same sort of relief you felt after retching up whatever shitty piece of meat had given you food poisoning. You weren’t comfortable, you weren’t _happy_ , but it was better than it had been. It couldn’t make you sick anymore.

He swallowed hard around the unpleasant lump in his throat and busied himself by looking around the cabin once more. If he was being honest with himself, it had never been his favorite part of the property. A fun little getaway when people were talking too much and he found himself desperate for some quiet time, absolutely. An actual point of interest? Hardly. Apart from the bed, the private bathroom, and the kitchenette, there wasn’t a whole lot of appeal.

“If you look right there, ladies and gents,” Josh said, projecting his voice into a carnival barker’s bravado, giving life to the hypothetical tour guide in his head. “You’ll see one of the many, _many_ hunting rifles Robert ‘Bob’ Washington decorates his vacation homes with—oh I’m sorry, what was that? No, no the man has never hunted in his life. No, not _once!_ I know! But who are _we_ to question the interests of Hollywood’s eccentrics, am I right or am I right?” The flat echo of his voice hit him in precisely the right way, and he managed a low (albeit watery) laugh. “Now, if you’ll please turn, you’ll also see the pointless guestbook Melinda has to keep replacing because of all the detailed phalluses people draw in it. I know what you’re thinking—who could resist drawing a dick in a guestbook?—well I have an answer for you! No one. No one, is who. The desire is too strong to be denied.” Unlike the rifle, he actually picked the guestbook up off the table, flipping idly through it until he hit the last page with writing.

1/2/14 – ‘ _Thanks for having us! Happy new year!’_

1/15/14 – Dicks. Just so many dicks. Some with faces, one with a monstrous pair of arms holding what appeared to be a frying pan. Artistic.

1/23/14 – ‘ _Sorry for using all the firewood! SOMEONE gets chilly ha ha HA! Beautiful rug Linda! Hugs and kisses! XOX’_

2/1/14 – ‘ _Attempted Satanic orgy in rustic Blair Witch house. Didn’t go according to plan and ritual was ruined. Stay out of basements.’_

He turned his head to the side as he read the final entry, recognizing and hell, even remembering having written it with Chris and Ashley, yet having absolutely no idea what they’d been talking about. The poem had come to him, so he figured that probably would too. He shut the book with a dusty _thump_ and began looking around again. “And _here_ we have…” he said, picking the tour guide voice back up. “A very strange selection of books that’ve accumulated over the years. Let’s see, we have…books three and seven of the beloved _Harry Potter_ franchise, uh, oh eugh, _Fifty Shades of Grey_ right next to the _Kamasutra_. Huh. Well that’s just fantastic. Real glad to have those thoughts occupying space in my brain, now. Hmm…not one, but _two_ Martha Stewart cookbooks, _Fried Green Tomatoes, The Catcher in the Rye_ …” He stood in front of the makeshift bookshelf, rifling through each of the titles with a growing sense of confused curiosity. “We have _Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, And Then There Were None,_ oh shit, son, _Pet Sematary_ , and…” Josh paused and pulled a book off the shelf entirely, flipping it over to look at the back cover. “ _Native American Myths and Legends?_ Is this even ours?” And then, glancing back up at the bookcase, “Are _any_ of these ours? Christ alive.”

Without totally understanding why he was doing it, he opened the mythology book, casually leafing through its contents. Wasn’t Ashley always going on about how you needed to _read_ to be able to _write?_ Never really made sense to him, that particular piece of advice, but shit. It wasn’t as though he was getting anything written just then, anyway. He laid himself down flat on the couch, legs hanging off one of the armrests.

For a long time (though he couldn’t say _how_ long, given his reluctance to pull his phone back out, coupled with the conspicuous absence of clocks in the cabin) he read through the legends, glad to have something to finally tug his mind away from his screenplay and his feelings and the girls. Some of the entries were only a few paragraphs long, others pages and pages. _All_ of them, however, were accompanied by at least one illustration: unfamiliar symbols, shapes that he thought might’ve been letters, carefully sketched animals, maps…and then he turned a page and found himself eye-to-eye with something that looked terribly similar to the girl in Hill’s painting.

Josh’s breath hitched, more out of surprise than anything else. He stared into the blank, unseeing eyes of the face drawn on the page. Except for a handful of differences, the image was eerily reminiscent of that ghastly painting. What were the chances he’d stumble upon something like that all the way out there, so far from home? Was it coincidence? Serendipity? Kismet? Some other five-point word Ashley would use in a game of _Scrabble?_

He literally had to _force_ his eyes to the next page to read the explanation of the image, the spiritual warning that came along with it. His gaze kept finding its way back to the face, no matter how hard he tried to look away. “Fuck me sideways,” he mumbled to himself, brow knitting as he delved into the story written in front of him.

*******

**Wednesday, August 20, 2014**  
**8:13am  
**

He’d been woken up by the panicked impression that someone had been calling his name. It was only after his eyes had sprung open and his consciousness began trickling through the folds of his brain that he’d realized it must’ve been a dream. He was, after all, alone in the lodge. That didn’t mean it had been any easier to shake the uncomfortable, creeping sensation that he’d heard a voice. He’d sat in his bed for an hour or two after that, eating the fun-size bag of Doritos he had the audacity to call ‘breakfast,’ propped up against his headboard with his ears straining. A voice _had_ cried out again, a high, ululating scream that made the fine hairs on his neck and arms stand at attention. It hadn’t come from the lodge after all, but the woods outside—a mountain lion, maybe, though he couldn’t remember whether there were mountain lions up there or not. A fox? Either way, he’d waited until his dread melted away to take his meds, and by the time he’d stepped out of the shower, swearing and shivering and making a mental note to check on the hot water heater before he tried _that_ again, he’d felt somewhat normal.

The sun was rising when he began his tour around the third floor, wandering the halls with the quiet footfalls of a guest instead of a proud owner. He maneuvered his way around the ghostly outlines of furniture covered in dustsheets, living out every snooper’s deepest fantasies. He pushed his way into the master bedroom and raided his parents’ drawers for anything that could be considered salacious, peeked under the beds of the guest rooms, threw open closet doors to see what clothes had been left behind, checked the contents of the medicine cabinet.

It was strange how familiar and foreign the lodge felt to him as he strolled through it. There’d been a time where, as a kid, he’d caught sight of the reflection of his own bedroom in a mirror; he could _still_ feel the way his brain had twisted around itself to reconcile how the room he saw in the glass was his and _not his,_ all at once. It was like that. Just like that.

He knew the floorboards and the decorations, knew which stairs creaked and which windows stuck, he knew which family members usually stayed in which guest rooms and which book in the library you had to move to open the panic room where they kept important documents. He _knew_ the lodge. And he’d never seen it before. Everything was new. Strange. How had he never noticed the way Bob had kept his directing awards so boastfully out in the open? How had he never taken the time to really _look_ at the sculpture hanging from the ceiling in all of its ugly, vertigo-inducing glory? More to the point, though…

“How have I never realized how fucked _this_ thing is?” He cocked his head to the side, grimacing widely enough to bare all of his teeth as he stood in the bathroom, staring at the couch across from the tub. “Why do we need this, Ma?” he asked the dead air. “Why do we need a literal _couch_ in the bathroom? What purpose does it serve? Why is it here? Jesus Christ. _Kamasutra_ in the guest cabin, _couch_ in the bathroom, who are we? What the fuck is wrong with this family?”

In his brain, something clicked almost firmly enough to be heard. He charged back out into the hallway of the third floor, scanning the area with the keen eye of a hawk. “Why…in God’s name…do we have so many goddamn _couches, period?!_ ”

That’s how he started the running tally as he made his way through the lodge. Third floor bathroom: one couch, horrible in its implications. Hallway connecting bedroom area to staircase area: one couch. Area above main staircase: _three_ couches, one sectional, one stuffed chair.

And that was _only_ the third floor. He made his way down the staircase, keeping his bag carefully slung over one shoulder as he went, still counting. Great room: one huge L-shaped sectional, one couch, two chairs. Dining room: no couches, surprisingly. Hall just off of the great room: one couch, three chairs. Area near back door: one couch, two chairs.

What the fuck. It was a ski lodge, yeah, and sometimes they had guests, but how many couches did one family _need?_ He circled back to the stairs, taking them two at a time down to the first floor. The seats in the cinema didn’t count, given there were _supposed_ to be a shitton of chairs in there, but…yeah, yeah, as he made a beeline for the basement door, there were another _six_ goddamn chairs.

“Who are we?” he asked the air again. “Why do we need to _sit_ so much?”

The basement was _freezing_ cold, the air thick with a lingering kind of dampness he wasn’t sure he liked. He added it to his mental list of things he’d have to look into fixing if he planned on making this a regular thing. There wouldn’t be much point in writing an award-winning movie script if he died choking on the mold that had taken root in his lungs. Josh narrowed his eyes as he clicked the overhead lights on, _also_ making a mental note to add ‘mold in lungs’ to his list of halfway decent plot twist ideas.

Regardless, he began the task of setting up his workstation. Dank and chilly as it was, the fact remained that the basement was the perfect place to write horror shit. If he had been able to reach into his own brain and pull out the ideal setting to plan murdering a bunch of hypothetical teenagers, the spot he would’ve ended up with very likely would’ve been almost identical to the cluttered mess beneath the lodge. It was full of his dad’s old props (meaning he could get ideas for his _own_ props and settings), it was spooky as hell (meaning he could be in the best mindset possible), and if nothing else, it had a bunch of corkboards (meaning he could…well, stick shit on the walls).

He set his computer down onto the desk he’d pulled against the wall, reaching into his bag to pull out one of the considerable folders he’d been filling with pieces-parts of his project. Having all of his references up in front of him was a _beautiful_ prospect—not having to flip through a million papers? Amazing. Fantastic. He could be in the middle of a scene, glance up at a diagram, get the answer to whatever question was bugging him, and get right back into it.

The first thing he found when he opened the folder was the scratch paper where he’d been keeping track of the roadblocks he’d been hitting. Leaning a hand against the desk, he set all his weight on one leg, letting his eyes quickly flick over the bullet-points.

‘ _-Time?_ ’ That was the tricky thing about writing scenes. When the hell did they happen? If you nailed yourself down to a specific time, you were cruising for a bruising, liable to get tangled up in _some_ sort of problem down the line. He figured he would stick to keeping it vague. ‘Daytime,’ ‘Nighttime,’ ‘Dusk,’ ‘Twilight,’ made things so much simpler, so much neater. Eventually he’d go back through what he’d written and make note of those…edit around any areas where it mentioned sunlight or stars. It would be fine, most horror took place during the night, anyway.

‘ _-Layout?_ ’ Figuring that one out was going to take some creativity. You needed a _setting_ to _set_ things in, and while he was fairly talented when it came to, say, painting set designs and building props, coming up with a whole architectural plan was a bit outside his scope. So for the time being, he’d settled on what he hoped was a workable placeholder. The lodge was too big to believably be his haunted mansion, but the floor plans were readily available, and—oh, look at that!—already pinned up on the wall. It would do until he was able to find something more suitable.

‘ _-Twist?_ ’ He needed to cross that one off, he realized.

‘ _ ~~-Antagonist?~~_ ’ But of course, he’d already scribbled the last one out. He _had_ his big bad primed and ready to go. The Psycho had _everything_ needed to be a truly fantastic villain (except, of course, for an actual _name_ …but again, that would come later). A callback to the golden age of slashers, he would have the same hulking, shapeless figure as Jason or Michael Myers, broad and intimidating and worst of all _faceless_. Josh didn’t have his heart set on a mask in particular, he figured he’d end up designing it himself, his only real stipulations being that it had to have the same vibe as the old classics while bringing something new to the table. Gotta keep that shit _fresh_. The Psycho would have his own bespoke weapon, too, though that was currently being narrowed down—gun? Boring. Hypodermic needle? Delicate…eh, but maybe. Knife? Sort of tired, definitely done before. Poison? How would he _do_ that, though?—the list just kept growing. The best was that he already had his motive, the answer to _why_ he was tracking down the poor saps in the mansion and taking them down one by one. Revenge, baby, _revenge_. Everyone loved a good, bloody tale of vengeance. He’d been wronged by the family that owned the land, and he planned on getting his pound of flesh from them…quite literally. Josh grinned up at the mock-up of the newspaper he’d yanked from the ream, resisting the childish desire to punch the air in victory as he reveled in how realistic it looked. ‘ **EX-JANITOR CONVICTED FOR ARSON** ,’ the headline read, twice as gorgeous in newsprint as it had been on his computer screen.

Ugh. It was all _so good_.

Or _would be_ , if he could settle in and actually get the words down.

Josh worked like that for the better part of two hours, organizing what he already had, turning the soggy corner of the basement into his own personal writing loft. Everything went up onto the corkboards: location names, floor plans, blueprints for weapons and torture devices, timelines for major plot points, through-lines that he had to stay on top of, important nuggets of foreshadowing he had to sow and then reap, _everything_. Last but not least, he began to tack up the finishing touch.

The character sheets.

It was crazy how quickly they’d come to him after talking with Ashley—almost like he’d just needed to talk to the right NPC before he could progress the plot. There they were, fleshed out and _real_ , living and breathing people with motivations and morals, relationships and dreams. Even if the story itself was stalling, at least he had _them_ to move things along. There was a long, detailed sheet for each of them, outlining _everything_ about them, from who they were to what made them tick, to what they were afraid of, to who their friends were…all the good juicy shit the audience would need to sympathize (or, God willing, _empathize_ ) with them. He put them up one by one, in the order the viewers would expect.

DUMB BLONDE, MEATHEAD JOCK, MEAN GIRL, COMEDIC RELIEF, HAPLESS DWEEB, SCAREDY CAT, ALPHA MALE, FINAL GIRL _.  
_

The cast.

_His_ cast.

Josh stepped back and regarded the wall for a moment, simply enjoying his handiwork. It was nice— _real_ nice—but not perfect. Not yet. So he flipped open the folder again, rifling through until he found the stack he was looking for.

He’d hated them when he’d drawn them, but standing there in the cool light of the basement, he couldn’t help but feel the slightest pang of pride. They were good. Very, very good. Even if the pages they’d been sketched on were slightly wrinkled, even if the perspective was a little off and the shading was wonky in some places around the hair.

Carefully, he pinned a portrait over each of the character sheets, making sure to put the right face with the right name. _Now_ it was perfect.

Still he had to wonder…what would Hill say if he had stumbled upon this strange display? An interesting question, to be sure.

Sitting down at his desk, Josh wheeled his chair far back enough to see all eight portraits at once. He crossed one leg over the other, leaning against the chair while contemplatively steepling his fingers under his chin. He tried not to grin. It was a weird sensation, tapping into his inner Hill, his inner analyst. Like a kid putting on a costume that _almost_ fit. But not quite.

“Well, Joshua…” he began, trying to imitate Hill’s bizarre inflections as best he could (which was, to be honest, not very good at all). “Something…occurs to me.”

“I’m sure it does, Alan,” he replied in his own voice, feigning a maudlin sigh. “Gonna tell me what it is? Or do I have to guess?”

“Oh, I won’t make you guess. That wouldn’t be very sporting, now, would it?” Silence as he tapped his index fingers together, gaze moving slowly from one sketched face to the next. “Of these drawings you’ve provided, have you noticed only _two_ are looking directly back at the viewer? The other six look off to the side, or out into the distance, yet two of them…well, you can see as clearly as I can, I suppose. So why is it that _those two_ , and those two _alone_ , are staring back at us, do you think?”

Frowning, Josh pressed his lips hard against his fingers and mulled it over. Damn good question. An actual Hill question. He didn’t like it. Didn’t like how he hadn’t noticed the eyes until they were all up on the wall like that. “Fuck if I know, Alan. Just drew them that way, pal.”

“Would you like to know _my_ theory?”

“You’re the shrink, man. Have at it.”

“Yes. Well. Eye contact can be threatening, can’t it? Intimidating. Menacing. Is it perhaps, then, _possible_ that you are, on some level, _afraid_ of those people? Do they make you nervous Joshua? What is it about them that worries you?”

His frown deepened. The voice was still more his than Hill’s, but god _damn_ if he couldn’t hear Alan in every word. He was too good at that, maybe. A psych major impersonating a psychologist. It only made sense he’d be good. Didn’t it? “Well that doesn’t make a whole lotta sense, Alan. Because _look_ at them. Why would I be afraid of _them_ , huh? Doesn’t really track that I’d be _scared_ of them, does it? Especially, uhhh _one in particular_.” He let the thought hang in the air among the dust motes. “It was just a design choice. Aesthetic. Would make sense for the big, bad macho character to look away—doesn’t match the m.o. He stares down the barrel the whole time, never flinches, and the audience just has to deal. I think you’re full of _shit_ , Alan. I think you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You’re like an English teacher that just likes to hear themselves talk. Sometimes the curtains are blue because they’re fucking _blue,_ my man. People can make choices that aren’t rooted in psychological trauma, you ancient quack.”

“I would be more inclined to believe you, Joshua, if it was _only_ your so-called ‘Alpha Male’ character who was making eye contact with us. But he’s not, is he?”

The frown became an ugly scowl. “No,” he muttered begrudgingly, realizing too late that he didn’t _actually_ have to say anything. “No he’s not.”

“Interesting,” his Hill voice droned. Josh realized his fingers were itching for a pen. “So perhaps there’s something to my theory after all. They’re two very confrontational portraits, wouldn’t you say? So perhaps you’re not _afraid_ of them…yet I can’t help but wonder…why do they concern you so deeply?”

“Nope. Nope. Nu-uh. Stop. I’m not paying you for this session, I don’t have to answer anything. How about this? How about we turn the tables, huh? You tell _me_ this, Alan. _You_ tell _me_ why I’d be afraid of _that_ face,” he said, pointing an accusatory finger in the general direction of Comedic Relief’s character sheet and portrait. “You tell me _that_ , you saggy old fuck. Why would I be scared of my own fucking face?”

Alan didn’t rise to the bait. For that matter, Alan didn’t answer. Whether that was because he wasn’t there, or because Josh didn’t know what his answer would’ve been…that was up for debate. Both were fair points. So Josh just sat there for a while longer, fingers folded in front of his mouth as though in prayer, and he tried to unravel the reason he’d drawn (almost) all of the others looking away. All the while, he tried not to feel the heat of the two men staring back at him.

Fear, huh?

That was a fucking joke if ever he’d heard one.

He wasn’t afraid of either of them. Not by a long shot. He wasn’t intimidated or menaced, either. He’d _had_ to draw Mike from that angle, that was all. Alpha Male, and all that. The audience would expect it. If he really thought on the two sketches, considered them long and hard, there _had_ been some uncertainty in his casting choice. Either _could’ve_ been the Alpha Male. He’d made an executive decision about the choice, of course, long after he’d drawn the portraits, so…so maybe that was all it was, a remnant of not knowing which of them would be the big, bad, macho star of the show. That was probably all it was.

Probably.

Good thing Hill wasn’t there. Not _really_ , anyway. He would’ve had a field day.

Eventually he managed to swivel himself away from the wall of familiar faces, turning back to his computer. He’d wasted enough time already. Strangely enough, he found the words came flowing freely once he knew he had something of an audience. Made sense, didn’t it? He was, after all, writing his story just as much for his characters as he was for himself. Maybe even more so. They were the ones who had to live it. It was _their_ world he was creating.

He made another mental note to go back and redo those two portraits when he had the time. Or maybe just his own. Or maybe just Mike’s. He’d have to think on it. The others’ were fine. In fact, the others’ were perfect. As it stood, he had a good start on his studio. Considering he’d have to leave later that night to make the trek home, that was good enough. He had time. He had _lots_ of time. There were miles to go, yet. Miles and miles and miles to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Just a quick note here at the end to say, as always, thanks for reading! I realized the other day that we're creeping ALARMINGLY close to this fic being a whole-ass year old (from when it was originally posted August 2018, before I had to switch accounts whoops), and that's mind-boggling to me. You guys are the best, and I hope that this monster that's been brewing in my head for the past couple years continues to entertain you. I'm so thankful for you all!! <3


	12. Where a serious mistake is (made)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Relevant tags for this chapter: Discussions of death (SURPRISE!), slight spoilers for the 2004 film "The Butterfly Effect" (it's been 15 years, I'm sorry), discussions of mental illness, death of family members, references to childhood trauma, only vague references to college life because the author is coming to grips with how horrifyingly long it's been since she lived in a dorm room, more friend drama than you can shake a stick at.

**Sunday, August 24, 2014**  
**1:43pm**

“You _sure_ this isn’t gonna get…weird?”

“Whoa, why would it get _weird?_ I don’t know what _you_ have planned for the rest of the day, but _my_ schedule has zero time for weirdness.”

Ashley rolled her eyes until they landed on him, her look less-than-scathing. “Chris.”

“Ash.”

Despite her worry, she smiled before quickly swiping her keycard and pressing the button for her floor. The elevator chimed a deep, bassy _ding!_ from somewhere above them. “You don’t think we’re like…rubbing this all in his face, do you?”

“Josh? Nahhh, he’s fine.” He waved the thought off like it was little more than an annoying gnat, “It’s all good.”

“I just think—”

“ _He_ offered to help. Remember that? Do we remember that part of it, Ash?”

“Oh shut it. You know what I mean.” The soles of her shoes squeaked quietly on the linoleum as she twisted them this way and that. “It’s just gotta be…strange for him, don’t you think? I mean…we’re all getting ready to start school, and he’s just…not.”

No, no he was not. Knowing she had a point (and knowing _she_ knew she had a point), Chris blew an overly dramatic raspberry and held his palms out helplessly. “ _Also_ his choice. Look, I’m sure if he was _actually_ upset, he’d—”

“What,” Ashley interrupted, raising her eyebrows but keeping her eyes trained low on the bag holding their lunch. “ _Say_ something about it?”

He realized a second too late that whatever excuse he’d been brewing wouldn’t cut it; he looked over to her, unspeakably glad she wasn’t looking back. He’d hoped to have… _something_ primed and ready to go, some sort of reassuring nothing he could just let fly, only to find himself perfectly unable to deny any of it. “I—look, we’d…we’d _know_ , right? We’d know.”

The elevator chimed again, the doors sliding open. Ashley blinked up at him for only a second, but really that was all it took. Chris knew what that look meant: _Would we?_ And shit, man. It was too early in the day to already have to admit to Ash that she was right. He’d have to give it another hour or two at least before he was willing to fold _that_ easily.

“Well looky here! Jim and Pam finally return. What _took?_ You guys get lost or something?”

Not _quite_ low enough to be a whisper, Sam asked, “Jim and Pam? _Really?_ ” as she nudged Josh with her elbow. “You missed the last five minutes! We thought you’d be right back so we didn’t pause it…want me to rewind?” 

“ _Ugh_.” It was hard to tell which comment had caused the groan. Ashley set the bag down on her desk and began the process of figuring out whose order was whose. “The last five minutes are the saddest part—I’m _fine_ missing them.”

“The _weirdest_ shit makes you cry.” Josh barely flinched when the burrito was chucked at his head, catching it with both hands in a show that was leagues away from impressive.

“Sam was getting sniffly too,” Ashley muttered petulantly, gently lobbing her something wrapped in tinfoil.

Grabbing it, she nodded, “I was. Can’t deny. _Won’t_ deny.”

Chris bent over Ashley’s shoulders, rummaging around in the bag around her hands. “Oh, me too, me too. _Super_ choked up, thought I was gonna just _lose_ it…” He snickered, whirling away to avoid getting shoved. “Makes me emotional _every_ time…”

“It’s the fucking _Butterfly Effect_ , what’s _wrong_ with you people? Nothing sad about it.” Josh rolled his eyes when a hand appeared in front of his mouth, “ _What?_ ”

Only half-joking, Sam glared. “You have _got_ to stop the whole talking with your mouth full thing.”

“I’ve got important shit to _say_ , Sammy.”

“Not _that_ important.”

“ _Hear hear_.” Ashley plunked herself down into her spot across from Sam. “Also? Just for your information? It’s _sad_ because he loves her _so much_ —”

“Uh huh uh huh uh huh…”

“—oh shut up! They’re so in love, and he tries so _hard_ to be with her and to make her happy and make sure she’s safe, but in the end, the only way he can give her a good life is to make her _hate_ him.” She stuck her tongue out when Josh continued to flap his hand at her. “It’s sad! It’s the _saddest_ thing!”

“Oh definitely. Definitely the saddest thing.” He nodded, furrowing his brow to show how very, very serious he was. “Tragic. But we have other matters to attend to. Namely…” Josh swallowed and nodded towards the pile between them. “It’s my turn.”

“Uhhh…it’s not, though. It was Sam’s turn when we left,” Chris pointed out as he took up his previous spot, back propped against the frame of Ashley’s bed. “I remember that _distinctly_.”

“Well it _was_ Sam’s turn…” Josh spoke with the slow, patient tone of a parent lecturing a child, “But she _took_ her turn while you fuckers played grabass downstairs for twenty minutes, so now it’s _my_ turn.”

Ashley glowered. “The delivery guy was late!”

“Uh huh. Okay.”

“He _was_. And—hang on. What happened during your turn?” Narrowing his eyes, Chris tried to search Sam’s face for answers. She only narrowed _her_ eyes in response, going so far as to quirk one of her eyebrows. _That_ wasn’t helpful. It was the _opposite_ of helpful, actually. “Since when do we take turns when no one else is around?”

“Since you guys took so long,” Sam deadpanned. She tore off a corner of the tinfoil wrapped around her lunch (ironically, a _wrap_ ). “It’s Josh’s turn.”

“Suspicious!” Chris projected it like an old-timey carnival barker, looking between the two of them with shifting eyes. “Exceptionally suspicious! Ominous, even.”

Josh leaned forward with his elbows against his knees, looming over the pile of phones. “Encyclopedia Brown, if you would?” He watched as mid-chew, Ashley rolled her eyes, waving her hand with a flourish to prompt him to continue. “So…as we can all _clearly_ see…” Holding his hands out to his sides, he turned about the room, brandishing his burrito all the while. “Your mysterious roommate has not yet moved in. A real wait-until-the-last-second kinda girl, huh? Lives life on the edge. Challenging the system. I like that. But since she isn’t with us physically, clearly we cannot antagonize her in the flesh. So. Would it be safe to assume the university’s already given you her contact info?”

There was a collective groaning from the rest of them as they began to realize what was coming. “Yeah,” Ashley sighed in defeat, “I have her phone number and email address and stuff. _Why?_ ”

“I just want you to send her a little text, that’s all.”

She blinked slowly as she stared at him, taking another bite of her sandwich. “A text?”

“Short one! Here, I’ll dictate it for you. Just type a quick ‘ _Hey baby, don’t forget the lube_ ’ and then a winky face, and then you can even send a second message like ‘ _Oh shit wrong person sorry lol_.’ I’ll let you _have_ that, Ash. That is my gift to you.”

“How benevolent.” Predictably, she grabbed her phone from the floor and flipped it to him. “Do your worst. I’m not telling you what her name is, so good luck finding her in my contacts.”

His second attempt at catching wasn’t nearly as successful as the first—Ashley’s phone flew right into his shoulder, thumping it loudly before clattering into his lap. “Aw shit. You don’t know me at all, do you? Sending a text would be too _obvious_ now, there’d be nothing for you to sweat over.” Setting down his burrito, Josh unlocked Ashley’s phone, squinting in thought. He tapped something, appeared to think better of it, tapped something else instead, and flicked one of his fingers to scroll.

 _Probably_ _her camera roll_ , Chris thought. That was always a good punishment for the game—as he knew firsthand. Nothing like getting a confused phone call in the middle of the night, only to see it’s your grammy trying to figure out why you sent her the same picture of a dick-shaped pancake seven times in a row.

“That’s a lot of scrolling you’re doing,” Sam commented, trying to peek over his shoulder. She laughed when Josh shied away from her, curling his shoulders inward to form a barrier. “Uh oh…what’re you reading? Is it steamy?”

“Oh _please!_ I learned my lesson last time. I don’t even keep _notes_ about my stories on there anymore.”

“Ooh!” Sam pretended to give her a short golf-clap against the heel of her hand. “I really enjoyed that one, though.”

“I’m sure you did.”

The girls continued to laugh. Chris, however, did not. Nothing was _overtly_ wrong, of course…but Ashley had put that nasty little doubt into his head downstairs. And now? Well, now _Sam_ was adding to it. As he watched, he realized Josh _was_ doing an awful lot of scrolling. An awful lot of _reading_. He tried to pick apart Josh’s expression, but that was always hard. If there was one thing Josh was good at, it was poker-facing. An angry, itchy worry prickled its way up the nape of his neck. How often did Ash clear out her texts?

But before the roots of _that_ thought could fully take root, Josh dropped the phone back into the pile to put an end to his turn. He shrugged, giving a curt half-bow to Ashley. “Your turn.”

She eyed him warily. “Do I even get a _clue_ what you just did?”

“Nope.”

“Mmm…” She didn’t seem particularly surprised. That was half the torment of the game, after all, having to sit and wonder. Having to _dread_ what would come next.

God, they _really_ needed more normal pastimes. What did normal people do when they hung out? Play Scrabble? Discuss the weather? That's what they needed to start doing. Weather-based spelling games. Nothing questionable ever happened during spelling games, he bet.

An idea seemed to occur to Ashley all of a sudden; or at least her expression and posture changed so drastically that she appeared to be doing her very best impression of someone accidentally sticking a fork into an electrical socket. “I’ve got something for Sam,” she announced, her self-congratulatory smile creeping farther and farther across her face until it threatened to cleave her head in half.

“Okay, uh…is anyone else worried?” Sam asked, glancing quickly between Josh and Chris. “Cuz I’m a little bit worried, not gonna lie…”

“Here…” Still beaming ear-to-ear, she leaned over to Sam’s side, cupping both of her hands around her own mouth to keep the guys from hearing (or _seeing_ ) whatever it was she said.

Josh waved his burrito in much the same way an angry professor might wave a pointer. “Um? Excuse me? Ex _cuse_ me, ladies? This is _strictly_ not allowed in the rules of the game. It’s Social Suicide. _Social_. Secrets are not fucking _social_.”

“Says _who?_ ” Ashley asked, turning away from Sam for only a moment, shooting Josh a defiant look.

“Says me?”

“Oh _please_. You guys change the rules all the time. _You and Sam_ took a turn while we weren’t around!”

Chris met Josh’s gaze with a shrug and a shake of his head. ‘ _Women_ ,’ he mouthed.

The two of them watched as Ashley ostensibly finished saying whatever it was that had occurred to her and sat back on her heels. Sam’s eyebrows drew inward and downward in contemplation. She swiveled herself enough to only barely face Ashley, appearing to be _deep_ in thought as she considered her face. She frowned, gnawed on her lower lip, and then heaved her shoulders up in the universal sign for ‘Yeah, sure, fine, whatever,’ before leaning over to whisper a response. Maddeningly, she also kept her hand blocking her mouth, making it impossible for the guys to guess what they could’ve been talking about.

“Secrets, secrets…” Chris singsonged, leaning back against Ashley’s bed. “Spill it, sister. What’d she dare you to do?”

“No dare!” 

There wasn’t any other way to say it: As Sam sat back, Ashley went on one hell of a face journey. She furrowed her brow, then opened her mouth, closed it again, whipped her head back to Sam (who shrugged meekly), opened her mouth _again_ , cocked her head to the side, blinked, and then finally shook her head. “Wow. I. _Seriously?_ ”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Sam said, dropping her face into her hands amid quiet laughter. “You asked.”

“I mean…I _did_ , but…” Reaching up, she pushed her hair out of her face, turning back to Sam with wide, disbelieving eyes. “ _Really?_ ”

“Hey, no follow-up questions!”

Ashley shook her head, settling back into her original place. “Oh, we’re talking about _that_ later.”

“I’m not surprised.” Before anyone could interrogate her further, Sam straightened her back, extending a hand to Chris. “My turn. I’ve got a dare for you, Mr. Hartley, and this one’s _really_ nasty.”

He turned to exchange another doubtful look with Josh, only to find he wasn’t looking his way. Hmm. Turning back to Sam, he bobbled his head mockingly. “Yeah, we’ll see about that. What would this dare be?”

“Gotta make your Facebook profile the _Twilight_ photo for at _least_ twenty-four hours.” Her eyebrows bounced up and down once as she watched his face fall. “I mean, or you could just hand me your phone and I could do it _for_ you…oh, and no artistic cropping. You have to keep the whole thing or else it doesn’t count!”

Chris shook his head slowly, grimacing with the sort of intensity that wouldn’t have been out of place had Sam dared him to eat one of his own fingers. “Okay. _Okay_. I’m—you know what, Sam? You know what? Fine.” He picked his phone up, tapping the screen to open his profile. “I’m not going to give you the _satisfaction_ of handing you my phone. Nope.” After a few seconds of tapping, he turned his screen around so Sam could see, shaking his phone back and forth in her face. “Voilà. You’re a sick woman.”

“Yeah, I’m a real monster.”

Josh crinkled up what was left of his wrapper, shoving the ball into the plastic bag everything had come in. “Fuck’s sake, I don’t _get_ why you guys hate it so much, I look _amazing_ in that.”

“Uh huh,” Chris said, letting his phone topple back into the pile. “Keyword? _You_. You look good in it. _You_.” 

“And isn’t that all that matters? I mean really.”

Turning his attention back to Sam, Chris narrowed his eyes. “All right. Time to pay the piper. I’m going right back to you, Sam.”

“Why do you say that like it’s a new thing? You _always_ use your turn to antagonize me. Literally every time we play. Literally _every turn you take_.”

He held up a finger to silence her. “Now. Per our earlier viewing choice…”

“Don’t do it,” Ashley warned, rounding on him with all the ferocity of a cornered housecat.

Pausing just long enough to feign ignorance, Chris widened his eyes. “Don’t do _what?_ ”

“Don’t,” she repeated.

“I was just going to say, based on—” without missing a beat, he popped both hands open, fingers flaring into the vague shape of a lumpy moth, “— _The Butterfly Effect_ , is there anyt— _ow! Ow!_ Child abuse! Quit it!” He laughed as he attempted to fend off Ashley’s halfhearted pokes, settling on pulling her into a one-armed noogie position so that she was at least somewhat restrained. “As I was _saying_. If you could watch old family movies and just poof back into the past, what’s something you’d change?” **  
**

Sam rocked back on her haunches, widening her eyes as though in shock. “Holy—are you for real, right now? Are you getting _philosophical_ on me?”

He lifted his chin in a haughty pantomime as he drawled, “ _Perhaps!_ Perhaps…” in one of the worst British accents any of them had ever heard.

“Wow, okay…don’t get me wrong, I appreciate not having to talk about my preferred style of underwear for once…just surprised, is all. Hmm…” Considering the depth of the question, Sam took only another second or two to answer. “I,” she began thoughtfully, nodding slowly to herself, “Wouldn’t.” She seemed to mull that over for a moment, pressing her lips tightly together, and then nodded again. “I wouldn’t change anything, I don’t think.”

“ _Nothing?_ ” Josh asked, sounding impressed. Or something _like_ impressed, maybe. “Well la-di-da. That’s some big talk. Samantha Janice Giddings can’t think of a _single event_ to change. Huh.”

“ _Janice_ _?_ You’re running out of names at this point.”

“No, nonono, that’s such a copout! You wouldn’t change _anything?_ ” Chris leaned over the pile towards her, raising his eyebrows as far as they’d go. “Nada?”

“Nope.”

“Zilch?”

“Nope.”

“The big zippo?”

She laughed quietly and raised her arms in a helpless shrug. “At the risk of absolutely _saturating_ this stupid, terrible game with cheese…no. No, I wouldn’t change anything. Because if I _did_ , then…” Rolling her eyes, Sam let out a loud, sheepish sigh. “There wouldn’t be any guarantee that I’d be sitting here with you guys right now, would there? If I changed _anything_ in my life, any little thing, then maybe I’d be hanging out with other people, doing other things, in someone _else’s_ dorm room. Maybe I wouldn’t be _here_. With you guys. And I wouldn’t want to risk that. So no, I wouldn’t change anything.”

Ashley’s lower lip had begun to puff itself outward, giving her the look of a child who’d spotted something disgustingly cute. Like a kitten whose eyes were too big, or a puppy in a sweater. “ _Saaaaaaam!_ ”

“Eugh,” Chris’s gagging, though hilarious, did little to cover his grin. “Forget I even _asked!_ Gross.”

“Not my fault you’re emotionally constipated.” Sam watched as he lifted his can to take a drink, crossing his eyes over the rim at her until she finally looked away. With another laugh, she lolled her head in Josh’s direction. “I think you’re up again, buddy boy.”

“Oh yeah? Go for it, blondie.”

It was probably nothing. Probably nothing at all. There was probably no reason for his jaw to seize like it was doing, leaving him with a mouthful of unswallowed soda. Uh oh. Uh-fucking- _oh_. Everyone was smiling, everyone was laughing, and there he was, contending with the first real twinge of dread. He couldn’t put his finger on it, that was the thing, but…when you knew someone for long enough, sometimes you could just _tell_ when something was up.

And if something _wasn’t_ up, then it was certainly _close_.

Chris braced himself, forcing his throat to work the way it was supposed to. He swallowed. 

“Um…oh, okay, okay, I got it. I think you guys have done this before, but it was _good_ , so I’m reusing it. So pull up—wait, grab your phone—okay, now pull up your browsing history and read off the last uhhh…let’s say six things you’ve looked up. And I have to check after so I know you’re not lying.”

“I’m not gonna lie.” All the same, he took his phone and unlocked it, opening his browser. “You guys sure are interested in my private internet time, huh? Weirdoes. Last six? Dust masks, Quality Copy Limited, bulk root beer, Algonquian folklore, online groceries near me, aaand how to throw your voice.” Josh turned his phone so that Sam could see he’d been telling the truth, tightening the corners of his mouth into a lopsided smile. “There ya go.”

“That’s a _weird_ combination of things.”

“Trust me, it could be _way_ worse.” He watched Josh as he said it, no closer to figuring out what was gnawing at him. “I’ve seen some _rough stuff_ on his desktop, between you and me.”

“Oh, I bet.”

“Why do you need _bulk root beer?!_ ”

“All right, my turn again. And shucks, as it turns out, I _do_ have a question in mind for American’s favorite redhead.”

“Hey, as long as it’s not another one of your gross dares, I guess I’m not complaining.” Ashley laughed as she said it, and again…Chris couldn’t bring himself to join in.

There was…what? Something in his tone? Something in his face? He wasn’t sure, _couldn’t_ be sure, but it was making him antsy. The tight, twitchy voice of anxiety in the back of his head was still stuck on his last turn. What had he been reading on Ashley’s phone? What was there _to_ read on Ashley’s phone? And shit, Josh was smiling, so things shouldn’t have felt weird, but God, he just didn’t buy it—no sir, no ma’am, not for one hot second. What _was_ that? He found himself watching Josh from the corner of his eye, pretending to be more interested in the blank calendar Ashley had tacked up on her desk. Why couldn’t telepathy be a real thing? Maybe if he just… _concentrated_ hard enough at him, Josh would get the picture and ask her something stupid, like if she’d ever actually peed herself laughing, or whether she’d had a crush on any of the teachers back at the high school, or—

“So level with me, Ashley. _What_ is the deal with your dad?”

Oh holy fuck.

Oh holy _mother_ of fuck.

The expression on Ashley’s face was…well, _hard to parse_. She hadn’t moved much, save to cock her head ever so slightly to one side. And she was still smiling, sure, but it had _changed_ , somehow. It was half-pursed, like she was trying not to react to tasting something sour. It was a smile, sure, but it wasn’t a _friendly_ one.

“Okay, I’m starting to get the _distinct_ feeling that we’ve hit the point we always hit in this game, where maybe we should stop while we’re ahead.” Sam said it diplomatically enough that a passerby might’ve thought she was elbow-deep in defusing a bomb, and Chris couldn’t help but wonder if she realized how very close to reality _that_ particular comparison was. It was possible she might’ve been confused about exactly what was going on, but Josh had asked the question in such a way that really…how much more context could she _need?_

Josh shot her a quick, reassuring smile, “Don’t worry about it, Sammy, Ashley’s _fine_. She’s a smart cookie, and it’s a _super_ easy question: What’s the _deal?_ You never talk about the guy! I feel like _maybe_ I’ve heard Jamie mention the guy during a gossip sesh with Colleen, but fuck, dude’s one big question mark. Was the divorce really _that_ bad?”

Without a single word, Ashley reached into the pile of phones, picked hers up, and offered it up to Josh. That tense smile hadn’t _budged_.

But Chris immediately noticed something else—her fingers were shaking.

“Dude, fuck off.” He hoped it had sounded casual. He had _really_ wanted it to sound casual; if he went and panicked, then Ash would panic, and if _Ash_ panicked, then Sam would know something was actually _incredibly_ wrong. Chris reached for Ashley’s phone in a bid to get at it before Josh could, only to have her wriggle out of the way.

She kept her gaze on Josh, brandishing her phone again. ‘ _Take it_ ,’ that movement said, ‘ _Take the damn thing_.’

Josh clicked out a short, contemplative rhythm with his tongue before shrugging and shaking his head. “You were all about making and breaking rules earlier, so hey, I don’t want your phone. I’m pretty sure I’ve got all I need from it, actually, so _now,_ I would just _really_ like to know something about your daddy situation.” 

“Josh.” Sam’s voice was sharper, though still miles away from outright anger.

“They _are_ divorced, right?” he pressed on, angling his chin so he had to look down at her while he spoke. “See, call me a hopeless romantic, but I have this cute little image in my head of Jamie and Scott getting together—wouldn’t that be precious? Think of how much fun _that_ would be. You two could be _sisters!_ Spend all your time together, braid each other’s hair, have secret little gossip sessions about cute boys…how sweet.”

Chris’s second try at taking Ashley’s phone worked out better, though not by much. Her hand had become a vise around it, the knuckles of her fingers beginning to turn white with exertion. He took her wrist instead, lowering it back down to the floor and setting his own hand over hers to try and keep the others from seeing how badly she was shaking. “Shut up, Josh,” he said flatly, finding it hard to unclench his jaw.

“Yeah, hate to burst your bubble,” Sam cut in, her smile having gone tight, her tone…what was up with her tone? “My dad doesn’t date.” She sighed after saying it, making it sound like a joking rebuttal. If that’s what it had actually been, then it had missed its mark. It didn’t feel right.

The _room_ didn’t feel right.

Rolling his eyes petulantly, Josh tossed one of his hands into the air. “You’re all making _such_ a big deal out of this! Ashley and I have been card-carrying members of the Daddy Problems Club since day one. I’m just trying to slake my curiosity here. How bad can it _be?_ Level with me.” 

“Josh, drop it.” Sam angled herself in such a way that she and Chris were _both_ effectively separating the two of them. It gave the surreal impression of a schoolyard fight gone awry, both sides stepping in to keep things from getting loud enough to alert the teachers. There _weren’t_ any teachers, though. It was worse than that, so much worse. Because _they_ were the adults, now.

“It’s _fine_ , she’s _fine!_ Man, you guys always underestimate Ashley. She’s spunky. She’s got some fight in her, she can handle her own. See, lookit that face. Now, does _that_ strike you as the face of someone who can’t fight her own battles? So c’mon, seriously, how rough could the split have been? I mean…unless they’re _not_. Are they still together? That seems unlikely, doesn’t it? I’d ask if you even know the guy, but hell, Jamie seems like the sort who’d keep track of her suitors.”

A muscle had started to twitch in Chris’s temple, probably from how hard he was baring down on his back molars to keep from saying some shit he might regret. He steeled himself as best he could, wrenching his eyes from Ash’s hand to fix Josh with the most heated glare he could muster up—which admittedly wasn’t _much_ —knowing that unless someone did _something_ , shit was only going to devolve. His heart was bouncing between his throat and his lower intestines, filling him with a queasy sort of energy. What did you _say_ in a situation like that? What did you fucking _say_ when someone went completely off-script and brought up one of the Things you’d _implicitly_ promised to never, _ever_ bring up? It was one of the goddamn commandments of friendship: Thou shalt not mention that Thing—thou knowest the one. You didn’t bring up someone else’s Thing, not even if you were fighting, not even if you’d stopped being friends and _hated_ each other, not even if you wanted them _dead_.

Josh had sure been _very_ particular about keeping his own Thing quiet.

“Just tell me that, Ashley. Tell me if they’re divorced. That’s it! Sammy’s already broken my heart, over here, telling me Scott isn’t on Tinder, looking for hot single moms in his area.”

“Josh,” Sam said again, tone growing tighter and more warning by the second.

“But hey! I’m realizing that doesn’t mean shit’s hopeless for you two. See, _Ashley_ , I’ve been looking at it all wrong.” 

“You need to stop,” Sam continued, and Chris was finally able to place what was going on with _her_ , if nothing else. He recognized it as the tone _he’d_ be talking with, if he could force the fucking words out.

“Sure, maybe Scott and Jamie wouldn’t be compatible. They both _do_ work a lot. Not home a lot. Wouldn’t really have _time_ for each other, I guess. But hey! That still leaves _two_ parents who _could_ be getting more acquainted!”

“ _Josh_.” Sam’s lips were pressed so tightly together that they seemed to disappear completely. That was it. That was the final warning.

“Depending on how big of a fuckwit this guy is—and I know, I know, I’m sure he _is_ a fuckwit, if you’re getting your panties into such a bunch over this—I mean, _he_ could go off and date _Sam’s_ mysterious mom who’s never around, and you guys could _still_ —”

And then it was on his tongue, and then it was moving past his lips, and holy _shit_ he was going to say it, he was actually going to _say it_ , he was going to shut Josh down in the worst possible way. “What the _fuck_ , man? Are you off yo—”

“My mom died when I was a kid.”

Everything…stopped.

Chris had been mid-word, mid-friendship ruining revelation, and all at once the air was knocked out of him. He turned away from Josh quickly enough that his glasses slowly started to slide down the bridge of his nose, really taking Sam in for the first time since the tense exchange had started. And _shit_ , he’d known _something_ was off, but… _Jesus Christ_. Suddenly he was sorely wishing he’d paid more attention to her reactions during the whole thing—her body language, her face, her eyes, fucking _anything_ that might’ve prodded him to act _faster_. But he hadn’t.

Sam was not wearing Ashley’s strange smile, nor was she shaking like a leaf in the wind. She held Josh’s gaze evenly and easily, her mouth turned only vaguely upwards. For a couple seconds (or by Chris’s measure, an entire _lifetime_ ), she said absolutely _nothing_ , letting the room stew.

Letting _Josh_ stew.

Chris turned back to Ashley, expecting her to be every bit as flabbergasted as they were. If she was, she was doing a damn good job hiding it. Her eyes were still firmly on Josh, her stare so intense that it threatened to melt Josh’s face under its heat. Under his palm, her hand continued to tremble, her rings biting into his skin, her phone making tiny pattering noises against the napped carpeting.

Josh’s eyes were wide. In jerky, rapid movements, his brow furrowed and unfurrowed, his mouth trying to fit around words that weren’t there. “Sam,” he managed to eke out, only to watch as she leaned towards the pile, took his phone in her hand, and dropped it onto his lap.

“I think it’s time for you guys to go home.” Again, she said it so _calmly_. Didn’t yell it, didn’t sneer it, just said it in that same horribly detached way, looking at Josh with an expression that was so…pointed? Poignant? So wrought with _something_ that Chris’s indignation gave way to half a second of pity for him. That wasn’t a look you wanted to be on the receiving end of, whatever the hell it was that she was trying to convey.

Avoidance was his strong suit, only narrowly behind denial, so he knew an out when he saw one. Chris grabbed his own phone from the floor with his other hand, giving Ashley’s wrist a covert squeeze before he stood up and straightened himself out. “Yeah, he said, nodding in Sam’s direction, “Yeah, we’re…gone. We’re gone.” He gathered up what trash was left from their lunch, bunching it up into a ball before starting for the door. 

“ _Sam_ ,” Josh tried again, unaware of the pincer-strike set up around him. “Shit. I didn’t—”

“No. You didn’t.” She nodded slowly and took her own phone, fingers lacing around it protectively.

“Go. Home. Josh.” Ashley’s enunciation was _perfect_ , bordering on downright _eerie_. When he turned to her, she was still glaring, color rising high in her cheeks and the tips of her ears.

There he found himself, caught between Sam’s inscrutable stare and Ashley’s undeniable fury. His head whipped around to find Chris at the door, and he begged him without words for some kind of backup.

As an answer to the question he didn’t ask, Chris opened the door and propped it open with his foot, averting his eyes into the hallway. Time did the stretchy thing again as he stood there, half in the hallway and half in Ashley’s room. After what might’ve been seconds but just as easily could’ve been minutes, Josh came shuffling past him into the hallway. He considered shooting one last apologetic glance over his shoulder before walking away…only to have the door shoved shut behind him, forcing his foot over the threshold. He couldn’t even begin to guess which of the girls it had been. He supposed it wasn’t really necessary to know.

Already Josh was a few yards ahead of him, so he had to pick up his pace to catch up with him, all the while desperately trying to figure out what in the _fuck_ had happened back there. Where it had gone _wrong_. They’d only stepped into the stairwell when Ashley’s earlier concern occurred to him again, and mother _fucker!_ He could _hear_ her in the back of his head: “ _You sure this isn’t gonna get…_ weird?” How had she known? How had she seen it _so clearly_ and so much _sooner_ than he had? Was he really that freaking oblivious? 

The bag of trash at his side crinkled as his hands balled into fists. Had he been a different person, he could’ve reached out and _shoved_ Josh at that moment. Could’ve put a hand between his shoulders and just _gone for it_.

Instead, he stood there on the stairs, letting Josh get ahead of him once more, finding a deflated sense of solace in the sound of the bag as he clenched and unclenched his fingers. “Hey Josh?” he asked once the worst of the desire to smack him had passed; his voice echoed in the cramped space of the stairwell, giving his voice the timbre of a wrathful god.

“What?” came the flat reply.

“What the _fuck_ was that?” He waited only long enough for the sound of his own voice to stop bouncing off of the walls. “What the _fuck_ is _wrong_ with you?!”

No reply that time. Just the sound of footsteps descending metal stairs.

*******

**2:50pm**

At the rate Ashley was pacing, she’d wear through the carpeting by sundown. The dorm wasn’t that big to start with, and with the piles of stuff that still needed unpacking, all she had was a narrow strip to walk up and down. Which she did. Repeatedly. Knuckles pressed against her mouth, stare far-off and unfocused. She just kept going and going, movements frantic with angry energy. “Wanna know a stupid thing that helps me when I’m upset?”

The mattress dipped and Sam looked up, trying not to show her surprise. Well. She’d done it again. She’d been staring down at her hands, zoned out so thoroughly that she hadn’t even noticed Ashley sit on the bed next to her. “Um, yeah. Sure.” She tried out a smile before letting it drop again, cocking her head to the side to show her interest instead.

There was no question as to whether Ashley noticed her discomfort (she did) but she neither drew attention to it nor pretended to ignore it. “You’re gonna think I’m crazy,” she warned her. “And maybe I am. Whatever. It’s really, really easy. You just gotta…scream.”

“… _scream_.”

The corners of her mouth turned up in a tiny, sheepish grin. “Yeah,” she laughed humorlessly. Reflexively, she covered her face with her hands for a moment, then let them drop, unzipping her hoodie and sliding herself out of it. “Sounds stupid, I know, but like…trust me. You just get something like…this…” Ashley brandished the now balled-up sweatshirt, “And then…” Just like that, she took a deep breath, pressed the fabric to her face, and screamed as hard and as loud as she was capable.

All the while Sam just _stared_ , listening to the muted shriek. When Ashley came back up for air, her face was bright red. She met Sam’s disbelieving gaze with an uncertain smile, and that was it. Before she realized it, Sam had grabbed the pillow from the head of her bed, folding it over once. Without giving it another second of thought, she buried her face into it and screamed until her head started swimming.

There was a dizzy kind of tilt to the room when they looked at it again—the air itself seemed to wobble uncertainly. And then Ashley took another deep diver’s breath and fell back against the wall to scream into her hoodie, and Sam felt herself lurch forward to do the same, her lungs wracking with the effort. They were both panting when they sat up again, faces flushed, hair out of place.

Ashley sniffed loudly, her voice coming out as a croak in an attempt at talking. She cleared her throat to try again, breath still whistling on each inhale. It didn’t feel right to make eye contact, not so soon after sharing a moment like that, so Sam settled on peeking from the corner of her eye. It was so hard to tell whether or not Ashley was crying…she always sort of had that look about her, like it could start at the drop of a hat. “I _told him_ it was going to get weird. _I told him_ we were rubbing this in his face.”

She didn’t need to ask. Her throat felt like she’d rubbed it raw with sandpaper before drinking a glass of Frank’s RedHot. Inexplicably, the ache was almost a kind of relief, a purging of something poisonous. Flicking her wrist, she sent Ashley’s pillow back where it belonged, pulling in a deep breath, holding it, and releasing it again.

“What an _absolute f—_ no. I. Ugh. _Ugh!_ Who does he— _GOD!_ ” Ashley pitched her hoodie across the room where it flattened against the wall before flopping onto her roommate’s bare mattress. “He’s such— _ugh!_ I’m sorry, I’m _sorry_ , but like, what a— _augh!_ ” Oh, she wasn’t going to have anything resembling a voice tomorrow. She continued to fume like that, mostly muttering angry half-words and wringing her hands, her furious trembling serving as a perfect counterpoint to Sam’s stillness. It was only when Sam reached over to set a hand on her knee that Ashley seemed to realize what she was doing. To her credit, she shook herself out of it fairly quickly, pressing both of her hands to her temples in some attempt at collecting herself. “Sam,” she said, voice positively wrecked. “I don’t…have _words_.”

People rarely did. Sam shrugged with one shoulder, giving Ashley’s knee a tiny squeeze. “It’s okay.” Ugh. _She_ wasn’t going to have a voice tomorrow either.

Whirling on her, Ashley frowned. “It’s _not_ okay, Sam. It’s not okay _at all_.”

That time she knew better than to try smiling. It wasn’t going to happen. Reassuring smiles were pretty much her body’s natural state, but boy howdy, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to make it happen even if she held both corners of her mouth up with her fingers. “You guys were going to find out eventually.”

“So that makes it all right?” Her fingers pressed harder into her temples, rings clicking together quietly. “That shouldn’t have happened. Any of it. I know you don’t…I mean maybe you _do_ …I don’t…I don’t _talk_ about…” Ashley’s frown deepened, her voice beginning to waver in a different kind of way. “ _That_ ,” she forced out after what seemed to be a real struggle. “ _Him_. I _don’t_. And they _know_ that, so when he—”

She squeezed Ashley’s knee again lightly, simply nodding when she looked her way. Her throat hurt too badly, her lungs ached, her insides felt scooped out, and she didn’t have the words to explain the conversation on the Washingtons’ porch. Instead, she nodded her chin towards the bottle of water she’d set on Ashley’s desk earlier, accepting it gratefully when it was handed to her. “I get it.” Sam took a gulp of water and tried not to cringe when it stung going down. “Like he knew the target to shoot for. Bull’s-eye.”

“It’s not a funny teasing thing, either. It’s not. It’s not like ‘Oh hurr durr, Ash has a crush on Chris, let’s make her say something stupid.’ That _sucks_ , but it’s not…”

“Mean-spirited?”

“Intentionally cruel.” Hands dropping into her lap, she eyed the bottle Sam offered her. She took it and lifted it to her mouth. “I had no idea about your mom, Sam.”

Another one-armed shrug. “I think you had an _idea_.” There was no suspicion behind it, certainly no malice, only flat fact. When she held it out, she took the bottle from Ashley, staring down into it for a couple of seconds. “Same way I have an _idea_ about…” Sam didn’t finish the sentence. After a drink, she let out a deep exhale. “Stop me if this is weird. It might sound weird. I feel like sometimes it’s kind of a relief to find someone else who doesn’t talk about one of their parents. When _you_ don’t, and _they_ don’t, you both sort of just…” She sighed tiredly, “Get it. You don’t need to know everything. You just have a good idea that, one way or another, it was bad.”

Ashley hugged her knees up to her chest, tilting her head against her shoulder. “That’s not weird.”

“There are different _species_ of bad, sure, but…bad is bad is bad.” A sound escaped her, something that might’ve been meant as a snort, and she shook her head. “And now it’s out there so.” _So who cares?_ _So what does it matter? So whatever._ She’d meant to say one of them, _any_ of them. Her throat had other plans. Still sore, still stinging, it locked up tight, cutting her voice off with a jagged edge. Sam raised her hands, let them drop, rolled her head between her shoulders.

“You shouldn’t have had to say it. Not like that. Like…not on your own terms, I guess. That’s not how it’s supposed to _go_.” Ashley went quiet for a second, hiding her face against her knees. “Not that that stupid game _ever_ goes the way it’s supposed to. _God_ …” From where she’d pulled into herself, she stole a peek at Sam, frowning again.

Everything was uncomfortably quiet in the room. Around them, the sounds of other people moving in served as a muffled backing track, the screeches of rearranged furniture cutting through garbled voices and faint music. Within their little square, though, there was nothing.

Somehow that felt _worse_ than the screaming.

Taking in a steadying breath, Ashley spoke into her knees, letting it all out before she could psych herself out. “The guys think this is like…super stupid and baby-ish, but…” The corners of her mouth tucked inwards even as she said it. Still, she seemed set on continuing; her fingers tangled and untangled around each other and she kept her gaze on them. She doubted Sam was looking at her (and even if she _was_ , the chances of her giving Ashley the same long-suffering expression the guys would’ve were slim to none), and yet the risk of it was too much for her to bear. “When, um…so. I’m sure you’ve like, noticed this. But I’ve got a lot of anxiety issues. Like, a _lot_ , a lot. It used to be way worse than it is now, though. Way, way worse. Like there’d be times where I couldn’t always…well, do…anything. Um. So I had this doctor, a therapist I guess, and when stuff was too hard for me to get out, she’d make me yes and no. Just like…I mean, duh, nod for yes, shake my head for no, that crap, that way even if I couldn’t find the words _myself_ , or couldn’t make my mouth move, or if I was too…scared or anything like that, she still sort of got the info out of me. And then we could work on it or talk around it, or…or whatever.”

Sam didn’t look up, per se, but she couldn’t help but to glance towards her from the corner of her eye as she set her water back on the floor. Despite everything that had happened in that past hour or so, the tone of Ash’s voice broke through the frustration and hurt that had been clogging her chest like old insulation. ‘I know this is ridiculous,’ that tone said, ‘And you probably think _I’m_ ridiculous too, but please, please, _please_ don’t laugh at me.’ It was a tone Sam knew all too well—one that had broken her heart every time she heard it behind Hannah’s words. Now she heard it coming from Ashley, and her heart broke in much the same way. You didn’t learn to speak like that unless you had already been laughed at. She watched Ashley avoid looking at her, face still hot and tingling from screaming into the pillow.

“So I’m not saying you _have_ to or anything, because you _definitely_ don’t, _at all_ , but um…if you thought it might help, or if you…I don’t know. I don’t know how I was gonna finish that sentence.” A small, humorless laugh punctuated the thought. “Um. I guess what I was going for was, if you wanted to talk about, or _not_ talk about, today, like…I’ll get it.” She continued to stare down at her hands for another second or two before throwing them up and letting them fall back onto the bed. “That was…really stupid, probably. Never mind. Ignore me. I just run my mouth when I’m—”

Sam reached over to put one of her hands on top of Ashley’s. It silenced her immediately—not in a shocked sort of way, and not in an embarrassed sort of way (much to Sam’s relief). They just sat there, quiet, until Sam squeezed her hand gently.

With a heavy exhale, Ashley pivoted to better face her, returning the squeeze. “ _Do_ you wanna talk about any of it? Or like… _anything?_ ”

There was a pause as Sam considered it, her lips pressed together tightly. _Did_ she? Did she, really? This was unexplored territory they were coming up on. She swallowed through the soreness of her throat and slowly, cautiously, nodded her head.

Ashley’s smile was small and every bit as cautious as Sam’s nod. She set her other hand atop Sam’s, sandwiching it in. “About what just happened?”

Another pause. The corners of Sam’s eyes crinkled with thought, her shoulders shrugging uncertainly. That probably wasn’t how the exercise was supposed to go.

While she struggled to pick her own feelings apart, it seemed Ashley was already a step ahead. “…about your mom?” she tried.

Sam took in a deep breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. There were words at the back of her throat, red and irritated, but no matter how she tried, they wouldn’t budge. For the life of her, she couldn’t decide whether to nod or shake her head. Yes or no. Yes…or no. Her head bobbed once, almost of its own volition.

“…you sure?”

Sam nodded.

“Um…” Ashley curled her legs up under herself, never letting go of Sam’s hands. “Was she sick?”

Another nod.

“Was it sudden?”

Slowly, reverently, she shook her head. Her throat gave an uncomfortable throb when she tried to swallow.

Ashley’s shoulders slouched. She squeezed Sam’s hands. “You remember her?”

There were times she found herself wondering the very same thing. But that wasn’t an option when all you had to work with was yes or no, so she looked back up to Ashley and nodded her head. It was probably close enough to the truth to count.

At the response, Ashley worried her own upper lip between her teeth. “I’m sorry, Sam,” she said, voice growing small. “I can’t imagine…” She pulled her hand back—the one that had been on top of the pile, rubbing agitatedly at her forehead and the bridge of her nose. It was hard to say _when_ she’d made the decision, but if she had to guess, she suspected it had likely been somewhere between Sam telling Josh to get out, and the two of them screaming until they’d had to lie down. Her heart was threatening to leap out of her mouth, or maybe she was going to puke. Both, possibly. Both were actually feeling pretty darn probable. What came out of her mouth next certainly _tasted_ like the worst combination of puke and heart parts she could imagine, that much was for damn sure. “You can ask _me_ about my dad. If you, uh, want. Or if it—I don’t know. It’s sort of…sort of the reason Josh got started on that whole shitty riff. So like. I guess it’s out in the universe now like you said, so, I mean, if you want. Because I mean, just… _fuck_ today.” Her tongue felt numb afterwards. “Can’t get _worse_ , right? So. Why not.”

Out in the hallway, a door slammed. What sounded to be a huge group of people walked past the dorm, voices unintelligible rumbles broken up by shrill laughter. They both watched the doorway as though they could _see_ them walk past, struck with the perfectly bizarre realization that life was chugging by normally as ever, outside.

Wasn’t that _always_ the case with them? They could go about their day-to-days, moving into dorms, eating meals, buying shoes, doing laundry, shit that could’ve—and _should’ve_ —been normal. Right up until the moment it wasn’t. Just until the precise second the record screeched and they were reminded that shit _wasn’t_ normal for them. Not on the inside. They could pretend all they wanted, but the people out _there?_ _Those_ people were normal. _Them_ , though? _Them?_ Well…the name said it all, didn’t it?

_Almost._

Time passed. Neither knew how much, given neither wanted to even _glance_ at her phone, but the group in the hall had come and gone, even the echoes of the stairwell door having long-since died out. 

“ _Are_ your parents divorced?” Sam asked, and Ashley nodded right away, clearly thankful that her opening question had been such a softball. “You ever see him?” That time Ashley shook her head no, and Sam realized this could prove trickier than she’d anticipated. “Do you…ever want to?”

It was a good thing she didn’t have to speak, because there weren’t words enough in the English language to describe how abruptly Ashley shook her head.

That moment, Sam knew, there were really only two things that could’ve meant. She looked back down to their hands, reminding herself that Ashley had _offered_. Still, she had to clear her throat before asking. “Alive?” 

Sighing loudly (and unless she was mistaken, _disappointedly_ ) through her nose, Ashley nodded.

With just those few nods and shakes, suddenly too many things— _way_ too many—started to click into place and form a story. Things like Ashley’s aversion to social media. Like why Jamie didn’t teach at the main campus but instead took on rotations at the satellite schools. Why the Browns’ apartment had an extra deadbolt on the door. It was only when Ashley squeezed back that Sam realized how tight her own grip had gotten. The picture being painted wasn’t a pretty one; it was downright _ugly_. And terrible as it was, she found her brain was already zipping back and back and back through the past few months they’d been hanging out, pausing only long enough to let her glimpse moments that had hinted at this reality all along.

Something in the back of her head thrummed warningly, as though she’d gone and whacked a funny bone she hadn’t known she’d had. Josh’s joking hit an entirely new nerve.

There was a whole slew of unpleasant questions buzzing around in her mouth, but Sam didn’t want to ask _any_ of them. The horrid curiosity was there, sure, goblin-like in its hunger, wanting to fill _all_ the gnarly gaps…

She couldn’t do it.

Maybe she could’ve asked and maybe Ashley would’ve answered, but it occurred to her (not for the first time since the guys had left) that once upon a time, she’d given a piece of advice. A pretty good one, actually, and one that she intended to take to heart, now: _What makes you a good friend, a_ really _good friend, is seeing those bull’s-eyes people have and ignoring them. Pretending they don’t exist._ Ashley had shown her a bull’s-eye, all right. Hell, Sam couldn’t shake the feeling Ash had just reached into herself and torn that bull’s-eye clean out of her chest, raw and rotting, a pulsing tumor she’d been hiding from the world at large, holding it out for Sam to see—and for _what?_ Because of a shitty joke Josh had made in bad taste?

Or, and Sam couldn’t begin to dissect what she felt at _this_ possibility, was it because _she_ had put one of her _own_ on display? 

It occurred to her that she had been quiet for way too long. “Bad dude, huh?” She shifted her position so she could lay her head against Ashley’s shoulder.

“Bad dude…” Ashley repeated it in a slow, deliberate way, testing the weight of the words in her mouth. Her earlier smile, the apprehensive one, reemerged as she rested her head on Sam’s. “Yeah. Yeah, you could put it that way. Bad dude.”

Hoping it would come off as more of a change of course than a momentary aside, Sam held one of her hands up, angling it in Ashley’s direction. “Was hers,” she said with a faint nod towards her bracelet. “It’s not fancy or anything, but…she always wore it. Gave it to me a few days before she ended up in the hospital for the last time. I always kind of wondered if like…she knew.”

Chest tight, Ashley looked towards the bracelet—the unimportant blue band Sam _constantly_ seemed to have on. Already she could feel her stupid traitorous eyes beginning to prickle in that telltale way; the _idea_ of losing her mom, of having to grow up and navigate life without Jamie…She tucked herself closer to Sam’s side. “It’s pretty.”

“Yeah. Dad says it was her favorite, but…” she attempted a smile and that time it _mostly_ worked. “I think he might just say it for my benefit.” Dropping her arm, she added her hand to the pile again, the two of them making a fleshy totem pole of fingers. “I used to get mad about it a lot. It was— _is_ —unfair. All my friends got to grow up and have their moms, got to like…I don’t know, talk about periods and stuff. Instead I got this _awful_ medical lecture from my dad…”

The laugh just sort of slipped out. Ashley had tried not to giggle, she had tried _so hard_. But the discomfort of the day, the adrenaline still pumping its way through her…it was too much when combined with the mental image of Sam’s dorky dad saying the word ‘menstruation.’ So yeah, a tiny laugh slipped out, and she immediately felt like the world’s worst monster.

Until, of course, Sam snorted a laugh of her own. “Uh huh. Trust me. However bad you’re imagining it, it was _worse_. Real bad. Hilarious in retrospect, but twelve-year-old me wanted to absolutely _die_.”

“I _bet!_ God.”

The laughter felt good. Not _great_. Good. Like the sigh of relief after a tense moment in a scary movie. Cathartic, maybe. It had the distinct effect of taking the edge off for the both of them.

“But Dad’s been a champ. He’s busy a lot with work, but he always makes time.”

“Yeah, I get that. Mom’s like that, too. Sort of like, super aware of ‘quality time’ and that junk.”

“ _Kind of_ overcompensating, but not _really_.”

“Oh my God, that’s _exactly_ it! Exactly.” Ashley shook her head, pausing only momentarily when she heard the familiar buzz of her phone. “You still get mad?” she asked after a time. “ _I_ do.”

“Nah. Not me.” Sam gave her one more tight squeeze before beginning to disentangle herself from Ashley. “It’s still not fair, and sure, sometimes I still get sad— _really_ sad—and I think I probably always will, just…” She rubbed at her face, suddenly unspeakably tired. “Part of life is losing people. All you can do is love ‘em while they’re here and remember them when they’re not.” Patting Ashley’s leg, Sam stood from the bed shakily. “Been trying to help Josh understand that. Don’t think I’ve been doing the _best_ job, huh?” Mostly to avoid taking in her expression, she quickly followed it up with a “You don’t mind if I use your bathroom, do you?”

“Go ahead, that’s what it’s there for.”

“You honors college kids,” she joked, “I’d kill a man for an en-suite bathroom, swear to God.”

It was a teeny, tiny thing, little more than a toilet, cramped shower, and sink, but Sam would take it. She let the tap run for a few seconds before cupping her hands under the spray, splashing her face with water that was almost painfully cold. Again, it felt good. Not _great_. Good. It cooled her skin, bringing her back to herself. What she wanted to do now was sleep. Sleep sounded _ideal_. **  
**

When she stepped back out of the bathroom and glanced over to the bed, she was more than slightly taken aback to see how _furious_ Ashley looked again; brow furrowed, lower lip beginning to pooch out into a little moue of anger, her thumbs tapping at the screen of her phone with bizarrely clipped, jerky pecks. Had Ashley been _writing_ and not _texting_ , Sam thought, her pen would’ve been slicing through the paper like an X-Acto blade. Raising her eyebrows, she sat herself down on the bare mattress of the roommate’s bed. “You doing okay over there?”

Ashley gave a quiet grunt in lieu of an actual response, nestling herself back into the junction of the walls as she stared down at her phone. “Fine,” she said in a voice that made it abundantly clear that she was _not_. Her phone buzzed audibly and she grimaced, upper lip curling to show her teeth as she began hammering out another reply.

“Wow, sure hope you took out the insurance plan for that thing. Gonna bust your screen like that.” Sam looked up from her lap when Ashley just _kept_ typing. “Is it Chris?”

“Nope.” Her voice came out as a strangely melodic chirp—the passive aggression piled on so thick that it was…uh, well, not too passive. Maybe it was just straight-up _aggression_. When she clarified, she spoke with a deliberate precision. “ _Josh_.”

Then it was _her_ turn to hum an answer. Sam crossed her legs into a prim half-lotus, acting as though it took more of her attention than it did. Her own phone, she noticed, was lying completely dormant on the floor, its screen dark. “Checking to see if you’re okay?”

“ _Pfft_.” That chirp again, accompanied by a tight, sardonic scowl. Ashley’s eyes flicked up to hers for a moment, one of her eyebrows quirking, “I’ve known Josh since middle school, and I can count on _one hand_ how many times he’s been worried about hurting my feelings.” At that, she _did_ , in fact, raise a single finger (which she brandished at her phone as if Josh could see it). Her phone gave another buzz, her eyes flew across the screen, and Sam could tell immediately whatever Josh had said had absolutely been the _wrong_ thing. Ashley sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes, flipping her phone onto the other side of her bed where she wouldn’t have to look at it. “I’m sure _you’ll_ be hearing from him before too long,” and though Sam had never had one of her own, the tone struck her as that of a younger sibling who’d somehow been wronged.

“…oh yeah?” 

“Yeah. He’s _real_ worried he offended _you_.” She folded her arms across her chest and let her head fall back against the walls. “Can’t imagine _why_.” 

“Yeah. Go figure.” Sam reached down to pick her phone off the ground, pretending not to notice when Ashley fixed her with a particularly interested stare. There was one more conversation the two of them needed to have. Sam knew that. They’d been laughing about it earlier, during the game, but man, it didn’t feel like a laughing matter anymore. Once, twice, she tapped her phone’s home button, desperately wanting something to hold her eyes while they got into it…only…it never came.

The day had taken its toll. Ashley sprawled herself out on her bed, staring at the ceiling. Sam maintained her lotus, closing her eyes after setting her phone down beside her. Neither asked the other anything else. Neither so much as _said_ anything for the better part of fifteen minutes, and even then, they only talked in terms of dinner and unpacking, which was all fine and good by Sam. She wasn’t in much of a mood to get into whatever it was that had been going on between her and Josh. Not just then. That would be a yes and no for another time. **  
**

*******

**Thursday, August 28, 2014**  
**2:40pm**

Of all the pointless ‘coping tools’ he’d been given in therapists’ offices, Josh thought deep breathing had to be the worst. There was something insulting about being told to ‘just take some _deep_ , calming breaths’ by another adult. He’d never quite gotten the hang of it either—he couldn’t seem to find the right balance between going so slow he started to suffocate and so fast he started to hyperventilate. Usually that meant he ended the exercise worse off than when he had started, feeling choked or dizzy or some unhappy combination of the two.

Today, it seemed, was a dizzy day.

“How do you feel now?” 

He didn’t open his eyes right away, instead covering his face with his hands and rubbing at the tension in his jaw. “Honestly, Alan?” 

There was a quiet chuckle from across the desk. “Honesty _is_ typically what I prefer.”

“Shitty. I feel shitty.”

Hill made a contemplative noise, and even with his eyes shut Josh could picture the look on his face with perfect clarity. “And would you say that’s from the exercise, or from something else?” **  
**

Josh rolled the question around in his brain for a second before dropping his hands. “A little of Column A, little of Column B, probably.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head, “Maybe more Column B than A, if you catch my drift.”

“Oh, I think I’ve caught it just fine.” Hill had taken to drumming the fingers of his right hand on the desk, his left hand supporting the weight of his head as he regarded him. He seemed…thoughtful. More thoughtful than usual, if such a thing was humanly possible. His eyes moved quickly to a spot beyond Josh’s head, and his expression tightened further. “Well _unfortunately_ , it does appear that our time is winding down. So, bearing that in mind, is there something you’d like to discuss before—”

“I went back to Blackwood.” He said it without looking up from his hands and with the blasé inflection of someone commenting on the weather, but still he winced inwardly as he felt it hit its target. The room had become very still, very silent, and while he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the space between his knees, there was no denying the weight of the stare he felt boring a hole through his head. “Last week. Spent a few days up there by myself.”

Truth be told, he wasn’t sure how he expected Hill to respond. Confusion? Anger? There was no _reason_ for him to feel any of those things—he was a _shrink_ , it was his job just to listen and nod politely—and _still_ he was shocked when his answer wasn’t burning with disappointment. “Hmm, did you? That seems like a long trip for you to have made on your own. Is there a reason you didn’t mention this during our last session?”

He looked up at Hill then, feeling the weight of a frown starting to tug at his eyebrows. There was something burning at the base of his throat, threatening to start crawling its way up his neck like ivy. Josh thought it might’ve been embarrassment; not from telling Hill, but from expecting him to lash out. “I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.”

“And now?”

Josh looked back down at his hands, scratching aimlessly at a cuticle. The muscles in his throat had gone tight as a rubber band tugged back beyond its limit. Rubber bands were liable to snap when pulled that far. Snap and sting whatever had been doing the pulling in the first place. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

Papers rustled softly as Hill leaned farther forward across the desk, searching his face with careful consideration. “What I do or don’t believe is of very little importance, Josh. What’s important is what _you_ believe, so—”

“Yeah, I…I get that. But…” He twisted his watch around his wrist. “ _Do_ you, though?”

Hill tapped his fingers against the desk for another moment before raising both hands up at his sides, palms upward in a show of acquiescence. “Do I believe in spirits wearing sheets, rattling chains and yelling into the darkness? Perhaps something similar to Jacob Marley rising up from the floorboards to torment Scrooge?” He lifted his shoulders in a shrug, the corners of his mouth turning down into an almost comical mask of uncertainty. “I can’t say that I do. Now…do I believe that our brains are incapable of _truly_ adjusting to the loss of someone we were close to? Do I believe that our minds fill in the gaps between reality and memory, creating some…imperfect impression of someone’s presence? _That_ …that I _do_ believe, as a matter of fact.”

“Yeah…yeah, I remember what you said before about your, uh…your grandpa. Grand _father_.” Josh nodded to himself more than Hill, lacing his fingers and letting his hands hang between his knees. “Same thing, kinda, isn’t it? The… _imperfect impression_ and a ghost? They’re both _there_.”

“I would say so, yes. Our minds can be our greatest tool, but as luck would have it, they can also be our own worst enemies.” Growing thoughtful again, he tilted his head to the side almost imperceptibly. “Do you think your family’s lodge is haunted?”

“I think—” His voice caught in his throat, cracking like he was fourteen all over again. Josh swallowed hard, tightening his grip on his fingers. “I _think_ …my _family_ is haunted.” It sounded ridiculous outside of his head, childish and unsteady, and he jawed wordlessly at the air for a moment as his brain tried desperately to stave off another wave of embarrassment.

Hill said nothing until he was sure Josh was done, one of his nostrils whistling quietly with the intake of a long breath. “By your sisters?”

“By…by everything. I—no. No, that’s—no. We’re not haunted, it’s…it’s more than that. The haunting is a symptom of the disease. A byproduct. I think we’re…we’re _cursed_. All of us. It’s like, like Bob made it big and started raking in the dough, a-and everything fell to _shit_. He just… _leaves_ to do his thing, and Linda leaves to do _her_ thing, and hell, you’d think we could at least say we’re the rich kids now and everyone _loves_ being around the rich kids, but Hannah ends up with these friends who only want to laugh at her, and Beth gets dragged into it because _she’s_ stuck with _Hannah_ , and then they get _killed_ and I get left here to watch everyone _replace_ them with other people—”

“Josh.”

“And no one _gets_ it! Or if they do, they don’t _care_. Because it’s not an actual _loss_ to any of them, it’s not a _crime_ , it’s not a _trauma_ , it’s a shitty byline in the newspaper.” He sat back, staring into middle space, holding both of his hands up in front of him with thumbs out at ninety degree angles as though to replicate the framing of a headline. “ _Twin daughters of media mogul missing in mountains!_ It’s a story. It’s a _story_ to them. Even the ones who were _there_ , it’s just a _story_ , Alan. Like Beth and Hannah were never _real_ , like they were never… _people_. Like they never did homework or never fell off their bikes or never lost their baby teeth or never got pissed off when Ma told them not to hang out with Melanie Simmons anymore because of all her piercings.”

“Josh.”

“My sisters are gonna be an episode of a podcast someday. One, single episode. ‘ _Some Fuckery at Blackwood Pines._ ’ It’s gonna be forty-five minutes of some nasally college sophomore with a shrine to Jeffrey Dahmer in their closet reading off a bad essay they wrote for some bullshit class they’re taking as part of their criminal justice minor. It’ll have fifteen horrible audio stingers, they’ll trail off in awkward pauses, and it’ll end with something like ‘In the case of the Washington twins…I guess we’ll just…never know.’ And that’s all they’re going to get. That’s all my sisters are going to get, and that’s all our family is going to be. A sad, creepy missing persons case on a mountain. But it’s _our_ mountain, because we could buy it. And it’s _our_ lodge, because we could buy it. And I’m _here,_ because Pop can pay for it. And he just keeps _working,_ so he can keep buying shit and so he can keep _ignoring_ that he has two kids who got themselves killed and one who just keeps…fucking… _trying_ to do the same.

“So yeah, yeah I think we’re fucking haunted. And I think we’re fucking _cursed_. I think Bob went and traded his fucking _soul_ for his stupid, shitty movies, or he built our house on a graveyard, or he rubbed the wrong goddamn genie’s lamp or _something_ , because we’re _fucked_. We’re fucked.” His chest heaved with shallow breaths as he finally— _finally_ —stopped to inhale. “We’re _fucked_ ,” he said again, spitting the word out like a hunk of raw meat, feeling his face burning and his head spinning. **  
**

After enough time had passed and he trusted himself to look up, he found Hill’s expression to be curiously blank. Even as he let his eyes slide from Josh to something obscured on his own side of the desk, he gave no outward signs of thinking or feeling much of anything.

Josh watched Hill’s gaze move back and forth over something near his elbow, obscured by the familiar silhouette of the driftwood carving. Whatever it was, Hill was clearly reading it. Through the haze of his lightheadedness, he tried to frantically flip through his mental Rolodex of possibilities: It wasn’t his file (that was on Hill’s other side) and it wasn’t his notepad (that was tucked away under Hill’s folded hands). What else could it have been? He was tired and sore and his insides throbbed like road rash, so he couldn’t even begin to guess. He didn’t _ask_ either—just continued to sit there, arms crossing tightly across his chest, eyes zipping nervously between the office’s thousand or so points of interest, never lingering long enough to give the impression that his interest had been caught, chest rising and falling at odd intervals as he reminded himself to breathe, breathe, breathe, just fucking _breathe_.

When finally Hill lifted his gaze from the desk, it was with that same vaguely vacant expression as before. “Would you at all mind if I stepped outside the office for a moment, Josh?” he asked. “I need to confirm something with reception very quickly, if that’s fine by you.”

His eyes flicked back to him so quickly he nearly gave himself vertigo. “I, uh. Yeah? Yeah, sure. You do you.” In all his time coming to the office, this had _never_ happened. Not even once. And Hill had already given him the wrap-up warning, so what on _Earth_ was he getting at, waiting until their last five minutes to dip and check on something? He was sure he looked every inch as confused as he felt, but he’d already said the damn thing ( _all_ the damn things), so it wasn’t like he’d gain anything by putting on a front.

“While you’re waiting, deep breaths. Remember, four seconds in, seven seconds out.”

“Yeah, I…” Josh blinked, “Yeah. You got it.”

With a quick, perfunctory smile, Hill stood from his side of the desk and briskly exited the office, closing the door behind him.

Josh twisted himself around in his chair to watch his retreat. It was just…it was _weird_. He quickly glanced up, eyes searching for the clock he’d always heard but never seen. The fucker was _hidden_ , though, probably another of Hill’s stupid old-school psychological tests, so he pulled his phone out of his pocket to check the time instead. 2:58. What the _fuck_ , Alan? He slid his phone back into his pocket, forcing himself to take a stupidly deep breath through his nose.

Four seconds in.

Hold.

Seven seconds out.

Four seconds in.

Pointless. Useless. His head was still spinning, but as he breathed, he was able to pin down what it _really_ was. Dread. Undiluted, cold, acidic dread flooding his mouth like the warning rush of saliva before retching out bile. He’d said too fucking _much_ , too fucking _strongly_. He’d let too much of it out into the light where it could be seen and judged and used against him. Hill was going to come back into the room any second now ( _seven seconds out…four seconds in…_ ), and he’d have paperwork. And then escort him back to the hospital, where they would change his meds (again) and monitor his behavior (again) and clip on the wristband (again) and rehash the same debates (againagain _again_ ). And he’d have to come up with some story to tell the others because Burbank was getting old and maybe Sam had bought it once but he’d fed it to Ash _twice_ and she was fucking _suspicious_ and maybe this would be the time where he just gave up and _told_ them and they could finally _do_ what they’d been _wanting_ to do and drop him like a hot bag of garbage on the side of the road and—

Behind him, the door opened with a quiet _click_ and a _whoosh_.

Every muscle in his body seized up, his seven-count abruptly cut off. Slowly, tentatively, he turned over his shoulder, fully expecting to see Hill carrying a thick sheaf of admittance forms.

He wasn’t. Huh.

“Sorry about that,” Hill said, catching Josh’s eye and smiling before shutting the door once more. If he noticed the gob-smacked look on Josh’s face, he didn’t acknowledge it, instead crossing the room with the casual gait of a man with all the time in the world. “Now, I realize that this isn’t _typically_ how we carry out our sessions, you and I, but it’s come to my attention that my three o’clock today is a cancellation. Meaning…” He dropped into his usual seat, setting his elbows on the desk and spreading his hands out as though in welcome, “There is suddenly a sizeable gap in my schedule!”

Unsure of what that meant, or, more to the point, how to respond, he continued to blink dumbly. “O-oh?”

“Do you have anywhere to be this afternoon, Josh? If not,” a brief shrug, “I would be more than happy to extend our time, today.” It was only then that he appeared to notice his expression. “It’s not an obligation, of course! No pressure. It’s a rare occurrence that I find myself in possession of an _hour_ with absolutely nothing to do, and it occurs to me that, should you wish to keep talking, for whatever reason, well…” He tapped absently at his notepad, “I could keep listening.”

Realization dawned on him very quickly. Understanding was another story entirely. “My insurance—”

Hill waved him off with a flick of his wrist that felt uncharacteristically flippant. “ _Pah!_ As I said, I wasn’t going to be paid for my time today, regardless! This would just be two people having a conversation in an… _admittedly_ peculiar setting.”

His tongue poked out to wet his lower lip as he thought it over, the pieces of the puzzle not quite lining up the way he would’ve expected. “That’s not how you run a successful business, Alan,” Josh mumbled uncertainly, relieved to hear more of himself in his voice. “Now, a successful charity, _maybe_ , but…”

“Deflection through humor is a defense mechanism—one that serves you particularly well, I will give you that— _however_ , it’s not an answer to my question.”

Did he want to stay in the office talking about his bullshit? No. Did he want to give Hill an even nastier look into the things that had been chewing away just under his skin? No. Did he want to sit in front of that obscene triptych with the pale, screaming wraith that sometimes looked like Hannah, sometimes looked like Beth, sometimes managed to look like both at once? No.

Did he want to make the drive back home to pull into an empty garage and sit in an empty house and contemplate the others’ secret little group text messages until he fell asleep?

No.

Something spongy was clotting up his throat as he tried to swallow. He was terrified his voice would come out strained when he spoke; he was mortified when those fears were confirmed. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Now, you _know_ that isn’t how this works.”

He heaved a sigh and cleared his throat in some futile hope his voice would come out steadier. “A man can dream. Do you mind if I, I dunno, move around?”

Hill swept his hand out towards the expanse of the office. “This is _your_ hour. By all means.”

It was a strange feeling, getting up and walking like he had the run of the place. He’d only poked his way through Hill’s office once or twice before, and usually that exploration had been contained to the bookshelves. He skirted around the couch and its ubiquitous box of tissues, moving towards the large, paned window Hill sometimes stared out of between appointments. The sun was hot on his face as he stepped into the patch of light, bright enough to make him wince. If he turned around, he thought his shadow would extend all the way to the door, limbs monstrously elongated, shape distorted into the stuff of nightmares.

“You know, Josh, you are one of my most _guarded_ patients.”

The faintest hint of a smile pulled at the corners of his eyes. “Is that professional jargon for ‘asshole?’”

“It’s not. A more direct translation might be ‘problem child.’” His chair swiveled with a tiny metallic creak. “You talk a _lot_. Were you aware of that?”

Surprising himself, Josh snorted a derisive laugh. “Uh…yeah. I have been told.”

“You talk a lot,” Hill continued, almost as if he hadn’t heard him, “But you never really _say_ much. You bluster. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing! It’s not a bad thing at all, in fact. In the right context, the ability to…talk, and joke, and play off insult as intrigue…those are all very useful skills. Adaptive, even. We’re social animals, humans—gregarious, if you will—and being socially adept is something everyone hopes to be. _However_. In the context of _therapy_ …” He raised an eyebrow in a motion that Josh was not able to see. “Not quite as adaptive. It’s very difficult to help someone with their problems if they insist they have none.” There was a groan from the chair as Hill shifted his weight, folding one of his legs over the other and leaning backwards. “I hope you can understand, then, why I would like to keep you talking today. Despite what you may think, I don’t particularly enjoy, or _bask in_ , the suffering of others. I don’t _like_ seeing you struggle. I do not revel in it. But pain is _human_ and sometimes we need to hurt before we can _heal_. We need excise the malignant growth. We need to have the rotten tooth pulled. I can’t help you scrape away the infection unless you show me where it is.”

His lips were numb under the pressure of his fingers, pressing them hard against his teeth. The sun was so bright that he knew he couldn’t keep staring out the window, but _God_ , the thought of turning and seeing Hill’s face, of seeing his own monstrous shadow…he wasn’t sure he could do that, either. “My parents can’t look at me. It was hard for them _before_ all of this, y’know? It’s, uh, _hard_ , I guess, to face the reality that one of your kids is batshit _insane_.”

“You’re not insane, Josh. ‘Insane’ isn’t a medical diagnosis. It’s a legal term. You’re not insane, and before you say it, you’re not _crazy_ , either.”

“Well, I think we can both agree I’m _pretty_ fucked up.”

“If you had a broken leg, would you insult yourself for not being able to mend your own bones?”  
  
“I—no.”

“Then how is this any different? Because it’s your brain? What if you had encephalitis, would you call yourself weak for not being able to will yourself out of a fever?”

“No.”

Hill spread his hands out. “Then there you have it. I would prefer if you wouldn’t speak about yourself in that way in my office. Outside of my office, as well, but I suppose there’s not much I can do once you walk out of my door.”

Pressing his lips even harder against his teeth, Josh furrowed his brow. “Well, whatever. Shit was rough before the…accident. Incident. Prank. Once it happened, they just…gave up, I guess. Couldn’t keep myself safe, couldn’t keep my sisters safe, couldn’t keep going to class, so like. What else… _was_ there? They look at me and they see the twins, and I…get that. I _hate_ them for it, but I _get_ it. If that makes any fucking sense.”

“You should have your family to rely on. It’s unbelievably unfair that you don’t. Family is the first thing we’re given in this life, and it should be the last thing we have when we pass. Yours is failing you right now.”

“Yeah, well. I’m failing them right back, so it evens out, huh?”

“I don’t think you’re failing anyone, Josh.”

Another curt laugh escaped him at that. “I think I probably know a few people who’d fight you on that one.” 

The clock ticked from its hiding place. “How are your friends doing?” 

“Uh…well Alan, I’m pretty sure they all hate me.” He turned away from the window to find himself momentarily sunblind, the interior of the office little more than a brilliant yellow-orange tattoo against his retinas.

He tried to blink it away, Hill’s disembodied voice asking all the while, “Why would they hate you?”

Nothing was helping. Josh leaned himself against the window, screwing his eyes shut and covering them with a hand in an attempt to clear his vision. “Funny story. Not funny ‘ha-ha,’ more like _cosmically_ funny.” He grimaced, trying to twist it into some sort of sardonic smile. “See, I keep doing this shit. I keep… _saying_ shit. Pushing shit. Making them mad or…that kind of thing. Really, _really_ messed up the other day. Didn’t even _mean_ to. Not—well. Not like it _happened_ , anyway. I got mad. Shit kinda went sideways. Got out from under me.”

“If you’re concerned that you’re creating problems between you and your friends…if you feel like you’re purposefully setting out to upset them, then why wouldn’t you simply _stop_ those behaviors? If you’re aware of it, if you _know_ you’re doing it, why persist?”

That was the question, wasn’t it?

He opened his eyes, the office taking shape in front of him piece by piece. Josh glanced down to his feet, eyes tracing the patch of sunlight he stood in. There was a strange lurch in his chest as he finally took in the shape of his shadow. All that time, he’d been expecting to turn around and see some sort of monster, limbs skeletal and stretched into points, misshapen as an old tree bent by centuries of storms.

But there it was—there _he_ was—just a person. No monster in sight.

That didn’t make _any_ fucking sense.

“Between you and me, Alan? I think…I think there’s a part of me that wants it to happen.” Josh stared at the floor, mildly let down when he moved his arm and his shadow shifted in tandem. It was him, all right. No denying that. “I think I _want_ them to hate me.”

Hill was quiet for a moment as he regarded him. “Well _that_ certainly seems like something we should unpack.”

“Good thing we have another hour, huh?”

“A very good thing, indeed.” 

***

**Friday, August 29, 2014**  
**3:19pm  
**

“Now, look. She’s probably…still pretty upset, okay? And that’s—that’s understandable, right? So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re just. Gonna go in there, make her laugh, smooth everything out as good as we can, and then…” Chris tried to rattle off next steps in his head, but nothing was immediately forthcoming. “Well, we…let’s just focus on the whole making her laugh and smoothing shit out, yeah? Yeah. That…sounds like a good plan to me. So repeat after me, we’re going to be _funny_ , we’re going to be _adorable_ , and God help me, we’re going to be _apologetic_ , you got that?”

No answer.

Chris groaned inwardly, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “You _gotta_ help me here, bud. This can’t be a one-man show, okay? Okay?!” He turned to his side, raising his eyebrows quizzically, “Are you _with_ me on this or what?”

The pug simply stared up at him from the other end of the leash, his big ol’ buggy eyes understanding _nothing_ , the curlicue of his tail wagging lazily.

“Don’t you blow this for me, Charlie Brown.” Chris jabbed a warning finger in his direction, but Charlie’s only response was to wag his tail a little faster. A sigh was heaved. He braced himself. He knocked.

There was a period of silence from the other side of the door that managed to stretch on _just_ long enough to make him question whether he had the right room. Obviously he _did_ , but…no, it was definitely right, he’d been there only a couple days ago! Ashley’s nametag was next to the door and everything! And—aw shit, aw fuck, oh no. The nametag said _Ashleigh_ B. Fuck. _Fuck!_ How did…

Chris squinted, suddenly questioning not only his choice in room but now his glasses prescription. Could that even be right?!

The door opened a crack, revealing a mere _sliver_ of Ash’s face. “What?” she asked, sounding (and honestly, given the door, _looking_ ) like the grouchy guard waiting inside the dive bar from every crummy action movie, waiting to hear a password before letting anyone through.

He was _sorely_ tempted to go along with that shtick, to say something along the lines of ‘The crow flies at midnight,’ or ‘Jesus tap-dancing Christ in a birch bark canoe.’ Instead, he squinted further, shaking his head as he tapped the nametags on the wall. “I’m sorry ma’am, I’m actually here looking for Ashleigh?”

She sighed, opening the door another fraction of an inch. “Chris.”

“No, no, no, not _you_. Ash _leigh_ , with a ‘gh.’ Ash _league-hhh_.” He didn’t afford her an opportunity to respond before flashing a doubtful grin her way, “Ash, please tell me I’m reading these wrong. There’s no way in hell they roomed Ashley B. and Ash _league-hhh_ B. together, right? _Right?!_ ”

Turning towards the general direction of the nametags, Ashley raised an eyebrow. She couldn’t actually _see_ them, of course, her view obscured by the wall; Chris could see the cogs in her head were turning, though, whirling furiously behind the stormy color of her eyes. “I’m sure they think it’s _real_ funny.”

“Think of all the wacky hijinks you guys can get into! ‘Oh, you wanted Ashleigh B.? No, sorry, I’m _Ashley_ B.! No g, no h, sorry about that!’”

No g, no h, no immediate laughter. Ashley’s profile shifted as she leaned her side against the doorframe, fingers drumming her arm. “You know…I _could’ve_ been in class right now. You _could’ve_ been waiting here for _hours_.”

He shrugged animatedly and watched her expression change when she heard the resulting jingle of Charlie’s leash. Maybe she wasn’t laughing, but oh, she was _intrigued_. He could work with intrigued. “Oh sure, sure, I could’ve. But you did—”

“Send you my class schedule,” Ashley groaned, speaking in perfect unison with him. “Guess I did.”

“ _And_ …” Chris let his voice trail off with a teasing ‘aw shucks’ lilt, “First week always means syllabuses—”

“Sylla _bi_.”

“And _syllabi_ mean class usually runs for all of uh…ten minutes before the prof bails to sleep off the rest of the hangover they got while ringing in the new semester.” He grinned again, more a comically juvenile baring of his teeth than an actual smile. “Figured my odds were pretty good.”

Her mouth pursed in the way it always did when she tried to pretend something wasn’t funny. “Whatever.”

Leaning against the doorway as best he could without revealing what he was holding, Chris lifted his eyebrows in as suave a gesture he could manage (which was to say, not very). “Forgive me here if I’m being forward, but _normally_ when someone shows up unannounced, the first question people ask is _why_ they’re there. _Typically_ there’s not an interrogation about their schedule-reading capabilities. At least not in my experience.” He tilted his head to shoot her a look over the frames of his glasses. “I mean, just sayin’.”

“Chris.”

“I’m just _sayin’_ , Ash…”

The pursed shape of her mouth wavered as she huffed an unnecessarily loud breath through her nose. “Uh huh. So _why_ are you here?”

With a sagely nod of understanding, Chris gave her another shrug. “Well, uh, it’s a little embarrassing, really…for _you_ , obviously.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. See, you kinda forgot something back home.”

A faint creased wrinkled the space between her eyebrows. “You drove like, an _hour_ out here because I left something at home?”

“It’s an important thing.”

Ashley blinked, then turned, clearly scanning her dorm for whatever might’ve been missing. When she turned back to him, her suspicion was evident. She narrowed her eyes before finally stepping back to open the door all the way. “I had like twenty different checklists! I have no idea what I could’ve _possibly_ —” Her eyes fell to the pug standing in the hall and all at once, her face brightened to the point of glowing. “ _Charlie!_ ” She knelt down to pick him up, her frown _purely_ performative as she stood again. “Why do you have my dog?” Even as she asked it, voice flat, she nuzzled her cheek against Charlie’s wrinkles, hugging him close.

“He missed you!”

She rolled her eyes. “Let me get this straight: You went to my house, had my mom let you in, _took the dog_ , drove an _hour_ to get here, _just because?_ ”

Sheepishly, he raised the plastic grocery bag in his hand. “Maybe there were baked goods involved too. _Perhaps_.” 

Ashley seemed to size him up for another moment, but by then, they both knew it was a ruse. She glanced down to the bag, then his face, then turned to walk into her room; as a result, the leash around his wrist gave a tug, and Chris followed after her, shutting the door with his foot. “You’re such a _dweeb._ ” Ashley cradled Charlie’s chubby body close to her with one hand, scratching his ears with the other. “You could’ve _texted_.”

“I coulda—”

“Or _called_.”

“I know, I know. I just sorta figured…” A quick glance around the dorm revealed no sign of a secondary Ashleigh, so at least there was that. He set the bag on her desk, setting about unwinding Charlie’s leash from his wrist. “First week of college, right? Weird adjustment. Thought maybe a doggy date—uh, playdate…thing would be just what the doctor ordered.” Great. Definitely smooth. Ashley was still scratching Charlie’s ears when Chris looked up from his hand. Her eyebrows were raised high with what he _hoped_ was amusement, but suspected was probably doubt. For a second time, he showed his teeth in a shamefaced simulacrum of a grin. “And, uh…not that I have ulterior motives or anything…but if I _did_ , if I _was_ the kind of guy who’d say, try to butter you up with cookies and, well, let’s not mince words here, a clinically obese pug—” Ashley _and_ Charlie snorted at that, “—I would most likely be doing it because I was trying to apologize. Probably for something that was…real shitty. N-not that I’m doing that, but if I _was_ —”

“ _Chrisss_.” Sometimes, not _often_ , when in the throes of a singularly intense emotion or thought, she’d say his name in such a way that it came out more like ‘Cress.’ A soft, infrequent valley girl twisting of her vowels usually followed by an impassioned ‘ _Stop iiiit!_ ’ or a half-serious ‘That’s not funnyyy-uh!’ or, much more likely, a wide-eyed, joking glare she could only keep up for so long before giggling.

It didn’t matter _what_ followed it, though…without fail, it _always_ made his stomach flip-flop in the best sort of way.

Charlie let out a blustery sneeze as he was gingerly placed on Ashley’s bed, immediately plopping his head down onto his paws to better watch the two of them with his big, sad eyes. Ashley folded her arms across her chest, tapping her fingers against her sleeve before settling on what she wanted to say. “You get that there’s like…nothing for you to apologize for, don’t you? Like, you _get_ that.” Her fingers flared and unflared in emphasis. “Literally nothing.”

“Not to be ‘that guy,’ Ash, but uh, I can think of a thing or two. Y’know…” he leaned against her desk chair, briefly touching his temple before throwing his hand outwards. “Just off the top of the ol’ noggin.”

Whatever she had _meant_ to say to that, she appeared to reconsider. Rolling her eyes to the ceiling, Ashley took another long, audible breath. Eventually she shook her head, rubbing absently at the base of her throat. “I’m…” she stopped again, still shaking her head. “I… _ugh!_ ” She dropped her arms to her sides, “I’m just gonna say it, okay? And I’m not saying it to be mean or unfair or anything like that, all right? I’m not. But Chris, it’s not your job to apologize when _Josh_ fucks up.”

He tried not to flinch. He did not succeed. It was a double whammy—the raw conviction in her voice and the ‘fuck.’ It was rare that Ashley swore, rarer still that she’d use the almighty fuck-word itself, so when she _did_ , it usually had an effect similar to getting your hand caught in a mousetrap. A snap, a sting, a realization that a mistake had been made.

“I’m not mad at you! I—Chris, can you remember the last time I was mad _at you?_ ” She regarded him carefully, eyebrows arced and lips forming a small ‘o’ as she waited for a reply. “ _I_ sure can’t.”

Groaning, he sank further against the chair, reaching into the bag he’d brought to grab a cookie. If he was going to weather this storm, he was going to weather it under the comfortingly cinnamony umbrella of a snickerdoodle. “No.”

“No,” Ashley continued, “Know _why_ neither of us can remember? Because whenever something happens where one of us thinks we hurt the other’s feelings, or like, said something really shitty, you know what happens?” In two strides, she crossed the distance between them, reaching over and taking a cookie as well. She held it up in front of Chris’s face, keeping it only a few inches from his glasses to ensure it took up his entire field of vision. “ _This_. This happens.”

It was a good point. Ash always had good points. There were times where he suspected she was just a bunch of good points wearing a person-suit. Chris stared at the cookie until she pulled it away to take a bite. “I-I-I still feel like crap, Ash. I could’ve—”

“Yeah you feel like crap! Of _course_ you feel like crap! You’ve been the one shouldering the blame for his…” she stopped mid-thought, abruptly enough to make him think she’d caught herself from saying something especially inflammatory. “…his gross behavior since we were kids!”

“Come on, it hasn’t—”

“Since we were _kids!_ ” Her hip rested against her desk as she spoke, staying close enough that she wouldn’t have to raise her voice by much, even when making a point. “That’s not your _job_. You’re not his _mom_. You’re not responsible for the crap _he_ decides to say. Does _he_ do that for _you?_ Hmm?” He didn’t answer, but she didn’t need him to. “Chris, I—ugh. Look. This was sweet. Really sweet. And I appreciate it a _lot_ , I really do, I just…” The corners of her mouth tightened. “I wasn’t waiting on an apology from you. I wasn’t expecting one. I didn’t _need_ one! Because you didn’t _do_ anything!” 

“That’s…that’s the problem. That’s the problem right there,” Chris said, raising his shoulders in a tired, defensive shrug. She went quiet and he gnawed on the inside of his cheek, part of him wishing he hadn’t said anything at all. “I didn’t _do_ anything. I should’ve done _something_ , but I didn’t. I never…do.” It was a lame way to finish, pathetic even, which sucked because it was already out of his mouth. “I never _do_ anything, Ash, I just…let shit happen.”

“What were you supposed to do? Get up and cover his mouth with your hands? Please.” She took another nibble of her cookie, still occasionally shaking her head as she contended with whatever thoughts were raging inside of it. “There wasn’t anything _to_ do. You know how he gets when he thinks he’s on a roll like that.”

Except that wasn’t true. Not even a little. That was part of the problem too—he _could’ve_ stopped it, he _could’ve_ shut Josh up. He almost had. But instead, he’d waited and waited until someone else had been pushed into acting. It hadn’t been enough that Ash had gotten upset, oh nonono, he’d sat there until even _Sam_ had been pulled into Josh’s ever-growing body count.

“I hope you getting all quiet means you agree with me. It better not mean anything else.”

Chris seesawed his hand in the air, avoiding her eyes. “There was stuff I coulda done. There _was_.”

Ashley clucked her tongue as she brushed the crumbs off her hands. “Know what? Yeah. Okay, you’re right. You could’ve popped him one in the nose, I guess.”

Despite himself, Chris forced out a weak laugh. “Hey, that’s me—lean, mean, punching machine.” He mimed a right hook, thumping her arm ineffectively. “Did you know these hands are registered as lethal weapons? They—okay, owowow _OW!_ ” he joked, recoiling when Ashley pushed his wrist aside with a single finger. “Oh my God. I’ve…I’ve never encountered someone so powerful before.”

“Uh huh.”

“No, I’m serious. Have you ever considered you might be…The One?”

Ashley rolled her eyes. “Not lately, no.”

“Well you _should_. Maybe—maybe it’s your job to save the world. Think about it. One girl against the forces of evil. Everyone loves you. Two equally handsome and equally boring, broody boys fall in love with you.”

“Oh God.” 

“You have to pick, Ash. Edgy guy who mostly wears black and has a tragic past? _Or_ …good guy who mostly wears khakis and has a past that’s somehow even _more_ tragic?”

She said nothing, simply watching him rant. If there was one thing Chris had in common with Josh, it was that there was no use in trying to stop the Joke Train once it had left the station. Ooh no.

“But be careful, because in like, Book Four or something, a _third_ dude’ll get thrown into the mix. Boring as the other two, handsome as the other two…but maybe with more tattoos or something. Or he’ll be half vampire. Ooh, or half merman.” Chris let it drop after his own laughter trailed off, feeling the room go instantly silent (except for the ambient sound of Charlie’s snuffled wheezing). “And, uh, I’m still sorry,” he said as offhandedly as possible. “Just like…for future reference.”

“I know,” she nodded.

Fully understanding that it was probably a bad idea, he swallowed hard and kept going, wiping his hands off on his pants. “I don’t want you to feel like…I don’t know, like…like I care more about his feelings than yours. Cuz I, uh, I don’t. And if it’s ever _seemed_ like that, I just wanted to make sure you knew that it’s…i-it’s not. You’re—” Ah, and there it was. The _big_ mistake. Chris looked up from his hands and towards Ashley, and in that moment, feeling her eyes on his, he managed to forget every single word he’d ever learned. He exhaled an awkward, shaky breath, trying to take a step or two back from the metaphorical edge he’d very nearly leapt over. “You’re my best friend, in case you hadn’t noticed. And I really, _really_ can’t stand it when someone makes you sad. Or mad. Or…”

“Or whatever the other day was.” Ashley tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, alternating between staring at her shoes and stealing quick glances up at him.

“Or that.” Shit. _Shit_. As though the universe had set out to prove some kind of point, there he was, in the middle of another moment where he could _do_ something. He could take that last step forward, he could reach out to take her hand, he could… _fuck_. “You don’t _ever_ have to talk about stuff you don’t want to, you know.” Saying something counted as _doing_ , didn’t it? “And like…fuck his stupid, shitty game. Think about how pissed he’d be if _we_ asked him something about—”

Oh the universe was proving a point, all right. It had to be. Because before he could so much as finish his thought, _Ashley_ did something.

No warning, no time to react—one second she was standing there, hip cocked against the desk, one hand up near her ear to futz with her hair, and then she _wasn’t_. Then she was a very solid, very _real_ presence against him, her body tucked so tight to his that he could feel her heart thudding away.

She’d done it so quickly that he’d hardly registered her moving. Her arms were wrapped so tightly around his neck that she was grabbing her own elbows. She’d tilted her head up just enough to set her chin atop his shoulder. And again, not to put _too_ fine a point on it, he could feel every inch of her against him, could feel the rasp of her sleeves against the back of his neck, could feel the insistent tug of her weight as she clutched onto him, and that…

Wow.

Okay.

Uh.

Wow.

That was…that was not a friend hug.

He realized a second later (when his brain and body were finally able to untangle the mess of sensory signals forming one doozy of a mental bottleneck inside of him) that he was just _standing there_ , awkward and stiff as a deer in headlights. He couldn’t _not_ react! He had to do _something!_ But oh God, he didn’t know what to do with his _hands_ , and—

Something changed. Someone shifted or Ash squeezed a bit tighter or _something_ , and the panicked internal screaming stopped. Without fully knowing what he’d said or how he’d gotten to that point, Chris set his head against Ashley’s, hugging her back with everything in him.

Later, when he was back home and able to process, he’d reflect it was strange, _very_ strange, that there’d been a time not so long ago where he’d thought there was no closer two people could be than they’d been the night they danced those slow, sad circles in the Browns’ kitchenette. He’d think about how wrong he’d been on that count. How _impossibly_ wrong he’d been. But that would come later. Just then, one arm around her waist, the other braced against her back, fingers caught up in the fabric of her hoodie, there wasn’t a whole lot Chris _could_ think about. He shut his eyes and held Ashley as close as he physically could, knowing that if he could feel her heart racing as it was, she could feel _his_ , too. It was an oddly exciting prospect, devoid of any of the embarrassment he usually found himself so paralyzed by.

It was Ashley who moved first, but in an absolutely unbelievable turn of events, moving didn’t involve pulling away. The grip around his neck loosened as she slid her hands down to the front of his shoulders. She thoughtfully patted the material of his t-shirt, untucking herself from the crook of his neck to meet his gaze. The difference in their heights, when combined with their sheer proximity, meant she had to look up through her eyelashes, and that shit just wasn’t _fair_. “Thanks.” Her voice was hardly a whisper, yet still perfectly audible. “For always having my back.”

“Always,” Chris said, still not really sure he fully understood what it was she was thanking him for. That part of his brain had been pushed to the side, cast away by some louder part that had started shouting again, begging and pleading with him to _do_ —to cup her face in his hand, to press his forehead to hers, to brush his lips against hers if only just to see what would happen.

But there were voices outside the dorm, loud ones at that, and he literally _felt_ the weight of Ashley’s eyes slide off and past him. Someone tried a keycard in the lock, jiggled the handle, shouted an irate “Oh come _on!_ ” and the moment seemed to melt from under their feet.

“That’ll be Ash _league-hhh_.” Pensively, almost _reluctantly_ , Ashley turned back to Chris, patting his shoulder again. Her mouth had squished into a regretful little shape that he couldn’t help but notice. It made him wonder whether she’d also been debating _doing._

The thought made his chest tight.

All the same, he let his arms drop, taking a conscientious step backwards lest they have something else to explain to Ashleigh. Really, the pug sitting on the bed and grunting would probably be more than enough conversation for one day.

Ashley was suddenly a hurricane of movement, taking Charlie’s leash in her hand and slinging a light messenger bag over her shoulder. “Um, you know, if you’re not busy…there are some _really_ bad paintings hung out outside the art building today…” Ashley helped Charlie off the bed, setting him on the ground after dropping a kiss between his eyes. “Do you wanna like…go make fun of them, or something?”

Chris did. He really, truly did.


	13. Where the girls (get real)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Be sure to check the notes at the end for a (dorky) little announcement! :P
> 
> Relevant tags for this chapter: Discussions of mental illness, death of family members, vomit, mold/rot imagery, minor body horror/gore, only vague references to college life because the author is coming to grips with how horrifyingly long it's been since she lived in a dorm room, the specific kind of horror that comes from having a dorm roommate.

**Saturday, September 6, 2014**  
**12:52pm**

When she saw the name and contact photo that flashed across her screen, she swiped to answer, pressed the phone to her ear, and said nothing. Instead she waited, cocking her hip to the side as she let her weight settle onto one leg. Her finger tap-tap-tapped against her phone’s case in a rhythm that somehow managed to be patient and expectant all at once, and hell, she _must’ve_ been spending too much time with Chris, because she could _literally_ hear his voice in the back of her head: _Patient and Expectant—The Sam Giddings Story!_

The other side of the line was quiet for a second. Then there was a sigh. “Sooo…I think we can all agree that _perhaps_ I fucked up a little bit.”

If it was possible, Sam’s eyebrows crept higher. Still, she said nothing, looking up towards the old ceiling fan turning languid circles above her.

There was some sort of noise _behind_ Josh, giving his line a weird static-y quality despite the crystal clear connection. She couldn’t totally tell what it was, but something about it felt oddly familiar. “And by ‘perhaps,’ I think it’s pretty clear I mean, uh, definitely. As in, definitely fucked up. Right the hell up. I’m just trying to figure out _how_ up I went and fucked it, because I know it was… _bad_ …but if there’s one thing this past year has taught me, it’s that when it comes to fuckups, some are a little worse than others, so…”

Sam had been inspecting her nails when his voice trailed off. She glanced towards her window with narrowed eyes as she heard the sound from his end again. An hour or so ago, she’d opened it in hopes of letting a breeze in, though that breeze had never really happened; summer hadn’t given up the ghost yet, leaving the air outside the screen heavy and sticky with heat. She took a deep breath in, released it in a quiet whoosh from her mouth, and stepped out of her bedroom. “So…”

“So, on a scale of like…one to ten, one being breaking up with Taylor Swift, ten being breaking up with Alanis Morissette, how nuclear was my whoopsie?” Unless she was mistaken, Sam thought she heard a hint of _relief_ in his tone. For someone who could deal—and _had dealt_ —the silent treatment out in spades, she suspected Josh wasn’t all that good at being on the receiving end of it.

“I have no idea how to use that scale. Which one is the worse one?” She took her time walking downstairs, letting the fingers of her free hand creep down the railing.

“Uh, _clearly_ Alanis? You break up with TSwizz, she’s gonna write a song about you, sure, but it’s gonna be poppy and danceable. You break up with Alanis, she’s going to record the musical equivalent of reaching into your stomach, eviscerating you, wrapping herself in your entrails, and then to add insult to injury, it’s gonna become the anthem of scorned women for years to come.” To his credit, he didn’t sound _half_ as self-assured as he usually did. The joke struck her as being more instinct than an actual attempt at humor.

The carpet underneath her toes gave way to tile as she crossed the first floor. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

“ _Sam_. You don’t know _Alanis?_ ”

“‘Fraid not.” Tapping into years and years of practice, she silently unlatched the sliding door, pushing it just far enough on its track to allow her to slip into the backyard before pulling it shut behind her.

“Fuck _me_. Remind me later, I’ll have to make you a mix tape one of these days.”

“What would the midpoint of your scale be?” The grass was warm when she stepped into it, the sky cloudless and almost painfully blue, the sun hanging so high overhead that the only shadows cast were slivers. As much as she loved fall, _man_ was she gonna miss summer.

Josh seemed stumped. As he thought about it, Sam soundlessly walked across the yard, making a beeline for the side of the house. “Midpoint, huh? Uh…okay, okay…worse than Taylor Swift but not as bad as Alanis…shit. Uh…”

She sidestepped the bags of lawn trimmings the neighbors had set between their houses like a line of soggy soldiers, keeping her phone to her ear even as she emerged into the front yard, staring _directly_ at the back of Josh’s head as he leaned against the driver’s side door of his car. Across the street, the source of the mysterious noise on his end of the call revealed itself to be a neighbor with a leaf blower, and _wow_ she was glad she’d been able to place that as quickly as she had—it made for a _much_ better entrance, in her opinion. For another second or two, she listened to him struggle to come up with a suitably hilarious quip, only stopping once she stood _just_ behind him. Then she _did_ drop her phone to her side, ending the call with a press of her thumb. “See, I’m just trying to figure out where ‘ _two weeks_ of radio silence’ falls between the two.”

Nothing, not even a gun pressed to her head, would ever drag the admission from out of her, but Sam had to fight _very_ hard against the self-satisfied smirk threatening to overtake her when Josh _jumped_ and spun around to face her.

“Boo,” she said sweetly.

“ _Christ!_ How the f— _Sam?!_ ” He fumbled with his phone, catching it and pressing it close to his heart in time to save it from clattering to the concrete.

“And so the scarer becomes the scare…e…” The corners of her mouth turned down at that. Eh, good enough. Sam folded her arms across her chest and looked up at him, patient and expectant as ever. “I figured you went and fell off the map. Nice to see I was wrong.”

“I, uh, yeah…I was…” he seemed to fumble for his words in much the same way he had with his phone, scrambling to find some kind of purchase in midair. “Busy.”

“Oh?”

Shock of shocks, he actually appeared cowed at that. Well…as cowed as he was _capable_ of looking. “Yeah, it’s this whole thing. I got kinda sucked into this project. You know how it goes.” He attempted a grin, but it didn’t come _close_ to reaching his eyes.

A quiet, half-interested hum. “Do I…get to see it?”

That seemed to startle him more than her sudden appearance had. Sam wasn’t sure what to make of _that_ , much less the obvious uncertainty in his answer. “Uh…I mean, sure. You’ll be the first one.”

“Cool, cool, cool…” She kept on with the nonchalant act as best she could, nodding slowly. “Sooo is there a _reason_ you showed up to my dad’s place instead of my dorm?” One of her eyebrows popped up, probably betraying the stone-cold façade she’d been trying to go for. “Sure seems like a lucky break that you ended up coming to just the right place…”

The grin was a little more convincing the second time around, if not a smidge sheepish. “You mentioned on Facebook that you were coming home to—”

“Oooh, can’t answer anyone’s texts, but you can creep on Facebook? I gotcha, I gotcha…that doesn’t strike you as a little, uh… _stalkery?_ ”

“Facebook was _made_ for creeping, Sammy. That’s literally its only purpose outside of making your old classmates feel inferior about their boring-ass lives.”

Shit. He had her there. “Mk, I think I get it. So you creep on my Facebook—”

“I creep on _everyone’s_ Facebooks. You are _not_ special, Samantha. Not in _that_ regard, at least.”

“You show up at my dad’s house and then call me from the driveway to achieve…what, exactly?”

Josh leaned himself back against his car with a dramatic sigh, spreading his arms out wide. “I swear, you’re just absolutely _devoted_ to ruining all of my setups. It’s a talent. Really—no really, it is! Have you ever watched _a single_ teen movie? Can’t a guy like, try and glaze over his shortcomings with a grand, sweeping, _cheesy_ romantic gesture?” His hands fell to his sides with a dull smack. “What happened to the good old days where you could surprise a pretty girl by hoisting a boombox over your head and blasting some Peter Gabriel in hopes of winning her back?”

Her other eyebrow cocked upwards to join the first. She shifted her balance to peek around him and into one of the car’s windows. “Do you _have_ a boombox in there?”

“I could,” he said, drawing the words out well past the four-syllable mark.

She met his gaze, blinking with all the enthusiasm of a dozing housecat. “No offense Josh, but you’re _hardly_ John Cusack.”

He staggered backwards against the door, clutching a hand to his chest. “I _finally_ find a movie reference you get…after all this time…and you use it against me. God _damn_.”

“I think you sort of had it coming.”

Clearly he wasn’t about to argue the point; he nodded, smile faltering into a thin, self-conscious shadow of itself. “Yeah. That’s, uh, that’s fair.”

Sam gave him another exasperated once-over, acting as though she hadn’t already made up her mind about where to go from there. She heaved a drawn-out sigh, beckoning him towards the backyard with a wave of her fingers, “Walk and talk.”

“I like it when you take charge.”

“Har-de-har-har. Watch the lawn bags. If it’s all the same to you, I’d _much_ rather receive my boombox serenade inside, where I’m not standing on cement the whole time.” She retraced her earlier path with him in tow, pushing the sliding door open to let them in.

“I was kind of hoping you’d end up letting me take you to lunch or something.” He set a hand against the door, half-shrugging, half-gesturing for her to go into the house before him, the posture making him look _significantly_ more abashed than she’d ever seen. Something about the slouch of his shoulders almost made the easy curve of his grin disappear. It occurred to Sam that he looked tired— _real_ tired.

She made a mental note to ask him more about this secret project of his once the dust settled. “Then I guess I should find some shoes.” When he passed her that time, she folded, offering him a smile of her own. Now, true, it was a smile lodged firmly in the ‘you-better-watch-yourself-mister’ side of town, but it _was_ a smile.

If there was one thing she’d learned in her time sitting at the nerd table, it was how to read a silence. When Chris got quiet out of nowhere, chances were good the threat level was low—more often than not, it just meant he’d suddenly remembered something he’d forgotten to do and was frantically wracking his brain for some kind of solution. Ash going quiet was always iffy…the safe bet was usually that she’d been struck with the fear something she’d just said had been offensive in some way, but there were those times where it suggested a blowout was on the horizon (more than once, Sam had found herself wondering if it was the same eerily accurate primal instinct that made animals lie down and cower when a storm was coming). Josh, though? When Josh clammed up, that was when you battened down the hatches, mateys. The _only_ time he stopped talking was when he had something he _really_ needed to say.

If there was a _second_ thing she’d learned in her time sitting at the nerd table, it was that the things Josh _wanted_ and _needed_ to say very rarely overlapped.

She pretended not to notice the way he hovered around her dad’s ridiculous snow globe museum, instead digging through the closet for her sneakers with an expression that made it seem as though it took ten times the focus it actually did. He’d get into it whenever he wanted to, she figured, whether that would be in the car, or on the way to lunch, or…

“I really had no idea about your mom, you know.”

Or shit, right now. Okay, sure. From where she knelt, tying her laces, Sam glanced up over her shoulder. “Yeah,” she nodded, “I know you didn’t.” She tightened the knot before bouncing on the balls of her feet, straightening back up. “ _Deeefinitely_ knew about Ash’s dad, though.”

Over at the shelves, he turned a snow globe upside down, sending a flurry of glitter whirling around what was either an artist’s reimagining of a Tetris board or the New York City skyline. “To be _fair_ …I have a grand total of zero details about that whole situation.”

“ _But_ ,” she took the snow globe out of his hand, setting it back in its place, “You had a pretty good idea.” Frowning, she realized she _still_ couldn’t tell what the thing in the globe was supposed to be. Upsetting. How much money had her dad wasted on _that_ travesty.

Josh watched the glitter flutter behind the glass, shrugging his shoulders in way of a response. “I said it earlier—I fucked up. I know that.”

“Did you apologize to her?” When Josh met her eyes, Sam cocked her head to the side in a gesture she hoped wasn’t _too_ matronly…though maybe _just_ matronly enough to drive home her point.

“I’m…working on it.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows as he said it. Clearly it was meant to drive home _his_ point, whatever it was supposed to be. “Honestly, I’ve, uh, mostly been trying to figure out how to apologize to _you_ without sounding like an absolute scumbag.”

“Well that one’s easy! You can’t.” She paused for effect…and then rolled her eyes at the flicker of panic that flashed across his face. “I’m _kidding_. You didn’t know, Josh—none of you guys knew. You think, what? I expected you to be able to read my mind? Puh- _lease_. I’m sure this’ll _shock_ you, but I’ve dealt with a _little_ worse than a passing reference to her, in my time. I mean, do you remember how popular ‘yo mama’ jokes were in middle school? Cripes! Trust me. I’m a big girl. I can take it. Now _Ash_ , on the other hand…”

He started to say something, got as far as making a croaky sort of sound, then stopped cold. Josh averted his eyes and absently scratched at his cheek, the very picture of internal struggle. “Sam, if I’d _known…_ shit, like, I’ve been all woe is me about family stuff with you for all this time, and if I’d had _any_ idea about your mom, I could’ve—I _would’ve_ been more…sensitive? Or I wouldn’t have unloaded so much on you, or—”

“Whoa there! Are you being serious with me right now?”

“I’ve been doing _nothing_ but talk about the girls since it happened, and _you’ve_ done _nothing_ but talk me off the ledge.”

“Uh, I’d like to go out on a limb and say maybe we’ve accomplished other things in that time. Y’know. For the record.”

“Every time—every _single_ time I start spiraling about them, you’re the one getting me to calm down, talking me through it, trying to convince me that shit’s gonna be okay—”

“Because it _is_ …”

“—and I’ve never reciprocated, okay? I haven’t done _jack_ , and then I find out that this whole time I’ve been throwing this fucking pity party for myself that you’ve been oh so graciously catering, _you_ lost your _mom_ , and…what the fuck kind of friend am _I_ , that I never even thought to _ask?_ ”

By the time she was (mostly) sure he was done, the snow globe had settled completely, its water so perfectly placid that it almost felt as though it had never been picked up in the first place. When she looked away from it, shifting her attention instead to Josh, she was hardly shocked to see he was turned away. That was fine. It wouldn’t last too long. Sam stared resolutely up at him, exhaling a deep sigh. “‘Hey Sam, how ya doin’? Know what just occurred to me? I’ve never checked which of your family members are alive. Mind if we go through the checklist real quick? It’s for science.’” As she’d expected, that was enough to get him to look down at her, the corners of his mouth pulled in tight. “Doesn’t sound _great_ out loud, does it?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do! I know exactly what you mean. You’re _wrong_ , but I know what you mean.” She held her palms out to either side of her face in a wildly inappropriate use of jazz-hands. “Josh, do you think I’ve been pulling all that stuff about grief and hurting out of my ass? Is that…is that what you think? I—okay, wait, don’t answer that. Point is, I’ve gone through it before. It was different, and I was younger, and there are a million other things that set it apart from what losing the twins has been like, but I’ve been there. I haven’t been _catering your pity party_ , oh my God…first of all, that’s the _worst_ metaphor I’ve ever heard come out of you, so like…try again. Secondly, just because you haven’t talked with me about my mom— _who you did not know about_ , I’ll remind you—doesn’t mean you haven’t been _reciprocating_.” Before he could go for another snow globe, she snatched his wrist in her hand, tugging it back down. “I lost my mom a long time ago, okay? That doesn’t mean it’s better or easier or I’m done going through everything that comes with it, but it’s doable on most days. _You_ are still getting used to this… _shitty_ new reality where you’ve lost Beth and Hannah. _We_ are. It’s fresh and it _hurts_.”

If he had anything to say to that, he was swallowing it down. He followed the movement of Sam’s hand with his eyes, no doubt disappointed when she felt the frenzied tick of his pulse in his wrist, proving his stony expression was hardly more than a flimsy cover.

“I used to get angry, too. _Real_ angry. At everyone and everything. Myself included!” It took all of her self-restraint to keep from snorting a laugh when he shot a disbelieving look her way. “Yeah, surprise, huh? It happens. It doesn’t _help_ , but it happens. I keep trying to tell you, I’ve been there, done that. _You_ haven’t. This?” With her free hand, she pointed between the two of them, “Don’t feel like it’s some one-sided therapy session, okay, because it’s _not_. This is a…a…real shitty hike. It’s gonna take a long time to make camp, and chances are good we’re both gonna come out of it with some giant mosquito bites and probably a bad sunburn, but _I’ve_ made it to the summit before, so maybe I lead the way for us on most days. Whether you like it or not, we’re in this together. We’re _connected_ , here.”

Josh stared at her for a long, long while, not moving an inch, not saying a thing. He seemed to be thinking very heavily about something, if the furrowing of his brow was anything to go by. “So let me get this straight. _My_ pity party metaphor was bad, but that _unintelligible word salad_ you just threw in my face is somehow _better?_ Is that what you’re saying? Is that—”

She pinched his wrist, shoving his arm away from her. “Would it kill you to _not_ be a dick?”

“It might!” He countered her shove by catching hold of her sleeve and tugging her into a hug, comfortably setting his chin on top of her head. His chuckling tapered out once she quit pretending to fight against his grip and simply let herself be folded into him. “I appreciate it. For real. I do. I don’t think it’s a secret that, uh…I have no fucking clue how I’d be doing… _any_ of this without you, so…I kinda freaked when I realized you might be pissed at me.”

It quickly became apparent that she wasn’t going to be able to answer like that, talking into his shirt. Sam braced her hands against the front of his shoulders, pushing herself away enough to be heard. “Buy me lunch, apologize to Ash, and we can take it from there, how’s that sound?”

“Penance in the form of Pad Thai. I think I can manage that.”

Neither made an immediate move to pull away; Sam couldn’t figure out whether that decision felt like a mistake.

“We’re _connected_ , huh?” Josh asked, hands heavy and surprisingly warm against her back. “Does that line usually work for you, or is it something new you’re trying out?”

“Does the nonexistent boombox usually work for _you?_ ”

He made a show of glancing from one side of the house to the other before flashing her a shit-eating grin. “Considering where it got me? I’d say yeah, yeah it works pretty decently, actually.”

And God, she wanted to say that it was all on him, but again, she couldn’t figure out whether or not that was right. She was so much _shorter_ than he was, and all _he_ would’ve had to do was bend down—it didn’t _actually_ matter. Whoever had started it, the result was the same. A bumping of noses, a brief laugh when she found his chin instead of his mouth, a kiss.

Though she couldn’t remember when she’d _closed_ them, Sam opened her eyes when they broke apart, some tiny piece of her thrilled to see Josh had closed his eyes, too. “C’mon,” she said softly, nodding towards the front door. “Buy me lunch.”

***

**Wednesday, September 10, 2014**  
**1:00pm**

The drawer of keys was considerably heavier than he had expected. When he dropped it onto the nearest shelf, it caused a metallic clanging that was so _unfathomably_ loud that he actually recoiled. “ _Fuck_ a _duck_.” It was too late to do any good, but Josh pressed his palms to his ears all the same, the scratchy fabric of the work gloves irritating his skin and muting the sound of his voice in his own head. “Not my _best_ goddamn idea. Ugh.” He shot the drawer a bitter look before shaking himself out of it and resuming his work.

Blackwood had been built as a resort. A big one. One with many, many rooms, as it turned out. And what did rooms need? Well gee whiz, rooms typically required keys. Math had never really been Josh’s strongest suit—not when he’d always had Chris to ‘help’ with his homework—but that particular equation was easy enough for him to wrap his mind around.

One door.

One key.

Hence the metric fuckton of keys before him. Boy, it sure would’ve been helpful if Big Bob had labeled…oh… _any_ of them, or maybe stuck them onto some kind of ring that corresponded with what floor they went to, or _anything_. Sure would’ve saved on time and energy. But since _when_ had Bob ever deigned to waste even a _moment_ of his precious time on something that might actually be _useful?_

Never! Not once. _Josh_ certainly couldn’t think of a single stinking time.

He hunkered back down onto his knees, his phone lying on the ground with its flashlight pointed up to illuminate each scratch and ripple of rust on the old doorknob. “Let’s try this one more time, kiddies,” he muttered to himself as he scooped out a handful of keys. “Only this time? Let’s do it with some _feeling_ , okay? All right? Sound good?”

The first key slid into the lock like a hot knife through butter. Beautiful. Perfect. He was about due for some good luck, he thought, so he turned it, hoping that—

_Clack_.

“One down, nine hundred to go.” He started a pile of rejects on the floor, making a mental note to keep track of how _many_ duds he went through. The last thing he wanted was to let one get pushed under a shelf or table, never to be seen again. God knew he’d get a lecture for _that_. Did his parents know what any of those keys opened? Nah. Would he inevitably lose the most important one? Oh def, def, def. That was how the cookie crumbled in _Chez Washington_. Always.

There was something almost calming about the process of trying each of the keys in the lock, one after another. Realistically, he could’ve just busted the thing down; everything in Blackwood was old as balls, and scrawny nerd or not, Josh figured he had enough fight in him to shoulder through one rickety basement door. Lecture, though. Lecture. He could _hear_ Bob’s voice in his head, sputtering through indignation. Bob was all about the anger, the bravado, the screaming until that ugly vein pulsed in his temple. And that was annoying, sure, and made him mad, sure, but anger he could handle. Anger he _knew._ But as the poster child of parental guilt tripping, Linda would be _worse_ (she always _was_ ). Growing up, he’d always had a creeping suspicion that she had very literally coined the phrase ‘I’m not _mad_ , just _disappointed_.’ At the _very_ least, she’d bought some stock in it. Majority shareholder, probably. Guilt, as it turned out, much like loneliness, Josh could _not_ deal with.

So he was left to open the door the old fashioned way. Key by key.

His last few trips to the Pines had been spent mostly on the lower floors, if one could consider the second floor ‘lower.’ He’d stayed below the third floor, maybe that was a better way to phrase it. The third floor was still…heavy. Something about the sight of the girls’ bedroom doors beckoned to him like the raw gap left by a lost tooth beckoned to a prodding tongue. There were _so many other rooms_ up there, his own included…and yet it was always Beth’s door he caught himself walking towards, always Hannah’s door he realized he was staring at. It was better ( _safer_ ) to stick to the other floors. He’d go up to the third floor eventually. Just…not now.

Not _yet_.

He dropped another key into the growing pile on the floor. _This_ was the important matter at hand. _This_ was what he needed to focus on.

Had it not been for the blueprints he’d tacked up onto the corkboard as a reference for his writing, he might’ve forgotten about the door entirely. There had always been certain parts of the lodge’s basement that were _strictly_ off-limits. Like the wine cellar, for example. _That_ had always been a no-fly zone for the Washington kids, mostly because of one disastrous Christmas when a shelf had collapsed, sending waves of pinot noir and shards of glass everywhere. If he was being honest, Josh _still_ had reservations about stepping foot in there, if only because of all the _ants_ they’d had to get rid of after that. So many _legs_.

But the wine cellar didn’t hold a candle to Bob’s storage. Oh nonono, walking into the cramped little hallway at the far end of the basement was strictly _verboten_. You didn’t go into the storage room unless you had some kind of death wish.

Which was probably why it had been his _first_ stop once he’d climbed out of the cable car yesterday. He’d found it locked, gone to the kitchen to try and find the key, and found an entire fucking _drawer_. The joys of homeownership.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, it was so _stupid_ , all the things that got drilled into your head as a kid, the things that triggered an instinctual rush of fear in the pit of your gut. He’d literally stared at the door for a full minute before being able to psych himself up enough to turn the handle to the storage room itself, and when it had swung open, totally unlocked, he could’ve fallen over in shock. Far from being the Batcave he’d expected, the area had been dark, dank, and more than slightly damp, the shelves and tables along the walls packed to the brim with boxes of catalogs and empty battery shells. There weren’t any heart-pounding family secrets on display (unless Bob was hiding some truly _heinous_ shit behind the spare light bulbs), and he certainly couldn’t see any reason why the three of them had been so vehemently warned against stepping foot in there.

Well. He could see how maybe _tetanus_ could be a problem, but…shit, that didn’t exactly make him feel better about how nervous he’d been to cross the threshold. And yeah, Bob probably didn’t want them rubbing their sticky kid-fingers all over his expensive equipment, but _again!_ That explanation lacked the gravitas Josh felt he was owed.

So whatever, he’d spent some time poking around the movie stuff, the old order forms, the antiquated piles of VHS tapes, the dusty boxes that had held film canisters once upon a time. Then he’d turned a corner and found the _other_ door. The second one. The locked one.

The one that was currently going through keys like Ash went through paperbacks.

On the blueprint, there was only a small, unmarked cell to suggest there really _was_ something behind the door, but that was all he had _needed_. His inner child, the angry, stubborn snot that he was, had decided that whatever was behind that door was the _real_ reason they hadn’t been allowed in the storage area. That was how it worked in the movies, anyway…some idiot would mess with a locked door, ignore all the red flags they passed along the way, insist on sating their curiosity even if it meant their downfall…yeah, _usually_ the idiot in question was, say, the jock or the blonde, the ones who were a bit, well, _lacking_ in the critical thinking department, but who was to say it couldn’t have been someone else? The comic relief could be an idiot too, if pressed. If they were the stoner type, then the audience usually just _assumed_ that they were, so…

He didn’t realize he was scowling until the muscles of his face cramped and he had to reach up and rub the ache away. There was a petulance to the way he threw the key into the pile of duds.

The story needed work. The character sheets needed work. It all fucking needed work. He grabbed another key and forced it into the lock.

Writing had slowed to a goddamn trickle. Nothing could change that. And he knew what the problem was, even if he’d been trying to pretend he _didn’t_ every time he opened the file. It was the formatting. He kept getting so lost in the weeds of screenplay logic—trying to plot out what camera angles would be ideal, or what characters would look best on screen together, or who the camera would focus on at any given moment, or whether the shot would be interior or exterior or close-up or pulled back—that he found himself too paralyzed to get any actual words onto the page. For the past week, all he’d managed to do was reread what scenes he’d already written, occasionally changing a word here or there to be more dramatic.

Rereading didn’t get him any closer to _finishing_ the damn thing.

The solution was obvious, of course, but ooh, no part of him wanted to admit it. The second he allowed himself to acknowledge the thought, he knew he’d have to follow through with it. That was _not_ something he wanted to contend with today. Especially not after—

_Thunk._

Josh stopped mid-thought, turning his attention fully to the door. The key…had _turned._ The key _fit!_ “Thaaat’s the ticket! Come to daddy, baby…” Without standing, he tried the knob, heart clenching for an instant as the mechanism stuck…and then gave way, the door swinging open an inch or so with a pained screech. He punched both fists up into the air above him, letting his head loll back onto his shoulders. “The crowd goes _wild!_ ” Mimicking the raucous cheers of an audience, he pushed himself up off the floor, grabbing his phone as an afterthought.

The beam of his phone’s flashlight cut through the darkness beyond the door, revealing…uh, dust. Mostly dust. Great. He held his breath until he managed to tug the face mask hanging around his neck up over his mouth and nose. He’d learned his lesson the last couple times, thank you very much. Wouldn’t _that_ be a fitting end to his story…fuck, he could see the headline now.

**‘Local Media Mogul’s Son Found Dead in Family Lodge – Cause of Death: Using Lungs as Air Purifiers.’**

“Friends and family of the Washingtons are asked to send Hoover brand vacuums to the grieving family in lieu of flowers,” he muttered to himself, the mask giving his voice a bizarre, blunted quality. “In his last will and testament, the departed, one Joshua Washington, _insisted_ upon being cremated and having his ashes spread in the basement of Blackwood Lodge. The irony is not lost on this reporter, ladies and gents. What a card that boy was. A real…knee-slapper…”

From the looks of it, no one had forced their way past the storage room in a _grip_. Some of the stuff he recognized when his light swept over it, but it seemed to just be _more_ junk, _more_ boxes of old filming equipment, _more_ old props from Bob’s earlier movies (his earlier _flops_ ), everything coated in dust, or cobwebs, or that weird waxy shit that plastic always seemed to sprout when no one was looking, or best of all, some _wildly_ unpleasant combination of the three. He picked up what appeared to be an ancient phone cord, coiled and kinked around itself like some undiscovered species of snake. A solid _foot_ of spiderweb stretched along with it, the strands so thick they were reminiscent of string cheese.

He let out a low sound of disgust before letting the thing clatter back to the floor. “ _Blurgh_. So much for an adventure, huh? Like sneaking into Al Capone’s vault.” Josh snickered to himself, tightening his throat to warp his voice into what he thought was a halfway decent Geraldo Rivera impression, still halfheartedly picking through the trash lining the walls. “ _Here we are, exploring the mysteries of Mount Washington’s Blackwood Pines Lodge. We’re hoping to find—oh, it’s some empty gin bottles and a stop sign. Neato._ ”

_God_ he was glad he’d brought gloves. Something that looked suspiciously like the beginning of a mushroom garden had sprouted on the inside of a sagging cardboard box he’d peeked into, and he couldn’t pull his hands away quick enough. At least it was beginning to make sense why the door had always been locked…this place was a biohazard waiting to happen. He peered down at the floor, weaving his way around the piles of stuff cluttering the room. There was another door he’d caught a glimpse of when he’d first charged in, but unsurprisingly, the handle didn’t even _pretend_ to give when he jiggled it. For a brief moment, he considered the drawer of keys back in the storage room…

Fuck that.

Given its position in the wall, the door _had_ to lead somewhere near the water heater, right? Right. Sure. Right? There was a (grate? slat? slot?) hole in the thing, right about at eye-level, too, so he slid its guard-plate open and squinted through it to try and figure out what he was looking at. Bringing his phone up, he jiggled it around in an attempt to see whether there was _anything_ he could recognize. Save for a dark glint of what he could only imagine was glass, though, there was _nothing_. Well that didn’t help.

He grumbled as he pulled the folded-up blueprint out of the pocket of his coveralls; the labels were lacking at _best_ , but if he had started there in the storage room…and if he’d walked that way…gone through _that_ door…

His finger traced the path he thought he’d taken until he found the door. If he went through _there_ , then he’d be in…the wine cellar? Could that be right? He peeked through the hole in the door again, shining his light. Still dark. Still nothing. But it made _sense_.

Josh slid his phone into one of his front pockets, the light facing outward to illuminate the door. Using it as a makeshift writing surface, he grabbed the pencil tucked behind his ear, lightly— _carefully_ —printing ‘ _WINE_ ’ and ‘ _STORAGE 2’_ into their respective cells on the blueprint before folding it up again.

Something was bubbling in his lower gut. Boy, Hill must’ve been doing _something_ right, because he recognized it right off the bat, no need to think about it. Disappointment. Mother _fucker_ , he was _disappointed_.

_This_ was the room Bob and Linda had warned them not to go into? _This_ was the room he and Beth and Hannah had had the fear of God put into them about? The big, bad, forbidden room in Pop’s workspace? _This_ was it? _This_ was what they’d theorized about and told spooky stories about back when they were kids, huddled around the fireplace after everyone else had gone to bed?

He turned around so his back was to the wine cellar door, the cone of his phone’s light showing him nothing but old knick-knacks and spent canisters of film, and he found himself blinking away a stinging deep in his eyes and sinuses. The dust, probably. Had to be the dust.

_I bet it’s an old bomb shelter_. That had been Hannah’s best guess—her _last_ guess, too. They’d been home for summer break last year, back when everything had been fine and normal and all right, back when the biggest cause of friction between them was Bob being a fuckwit and Linda pretending he wasn’t. _The last unit of that awful history class I took this semester was all about them. People would build them under their houses during the Cold War in case of nuclear fallout._

_We’re in_ Canada _, Han, I don’t think they were too worried about the Cold War_ , Beth had teased, and if he focused hard enough, Josh thought he could still remember the way her face had gone thoughtful. _Wait. Shit. Were they? Still, no way it’s that. They’d probably_ want _us to know about a bomb shelter, don’t you think?_

_Okay, genius, what’s in there, then?_

_Um, isn’t it obvious?_ They’d been leaning against the railings of the third floor, staring out towards the horrendous ball-of-twine sculpture hanging over the great room, listening to the hum of the central air kicking on. _Sex dungeon_. Both he and Hannah had audibly reacted to that, gagging and shouting about eye-bleach. _Think about it! They don’t want us going in there, they won’t tell us_ why _…it’s probably where they keep all the leather and shit._

“And you say _I’m_ the twisted one,” Josh said aloud, mumbling more than actually speaking. The light of his phone moved with his chest as he pulled in a deep breath.

_You are!_ They had said it together, just another case of their weird twin telepathy (or _‘twinlepathy,’_ if you mentioned it within earshot of Chris), before collapsing into laughter. He could remember it so clearly, so intensely; their sweaty arms had been sticking to the bannister, Hannah’s hair had been pulled back in the way Sam always wore it, Beth had been dealing with a horrendous farmer’s tan. They were still so many months away from October, from hating him, _resenting_ him…and a lifetime away from February.

“That’s fair.” On the opposite wall, a shape caught his eye. Josh frowned even as he tried to recall their conversation, plastic bags and old magazine pages crinkling under his feet with each step. “You’re both _totally_ wrong, by the way. That’s where they keep the bodies.”

_Bodies?_

“Yeah, didn’t you know? That’s why Ma’s always going on about the land this place is built on.”

_Shut up, you’re so full of it_.

“Nah, nah. Right under the lodge? Ceremonial burial ground. You guys knew that, right? That’s all the creaking at night. Restless spirits.” It was another door. He pulled the blueprint out of his pocket again, smoothing it out on his leg. There wasn’t anything to suggest a _door_ on the paper…but there _was_ a small, bolded ‘ **x** ’ where he thought it should be. Now that, boys and girls, was an interesting development. “Go through that door, and you’re gonna find a whole mess of bodies. Did you know in _Poltergeist_ , they used _real_ bodies in the pool scene? Too expensive back then to make fake ones. I’ll bet ya dollars to donuts Pop’s been doing the same. That’s his corpse-cooler.”

_Josh! Ew!_

“No, I’m serious you guys! Incredibly serious! Grab whatever body parts you want. Arms? By the dozens! How about heads? He’s got an entire pantry _full_ of nothing _but_ heads. You want feet? He’s got feet. That one _might_ be a fetish, but I’m not asking. Either way, it’s a real shitshow in there. Gore _galore_ …” He didn’t even need to push the door for it to open—he _touched_ it and something in its hinges gave way, a rusty squeal echoing through the room. It smacked against the wall behind it and Josh was left to _stare_ at what he saw just over the threshold. He checked the blueprint again.

Suddenly, the idea of him dying in the lodge didn’t feel so funny. It probably would’ve been poetically just and shit, the cinematic parallels to what had happened to the twins would’ve been _beautiful_ , but funny? No. Not even a bit.

He stared down the dark staircase that had been hidden behind the door that, according to the blueprint in his hand, didn’t exist. Josh shut his eyes as tightly as he could, squeezing them until bright lights danced across the back of his eyelids. As though to reassure himself, he reached out in front of him, touching the jamb of the door, and slowly opened his eyes to look down the stairs once more. Whatever this was, wherever it _went_ , it was real, the doorway solid under the palm of his hand.

There was no one else in the lodge, so he knew it was ridiculous, but he couldn’t help throwing a brief glance over his shoulder towards the storage room. Its door hung open just as he’d left it, only the faintest bit of afternoon light creeping through its dingy old windows. The sunlight seemed very, very far away. The darkness of the staircase was so much closer…and there was something else to it, too. Something…hungry, almost. Magnetic.

He felt around for a railing that wasn’t there before taking a careful step down. Then another. And another. And another. Another. Another.

It was his imagination, he was sure, that made him feel as though his ears were going to pop. There wasn’t any sort of way he was going down far enough that there’d be an actual _pressure change_. That would be ridiculous.

The dust grew thicker around him until even the mask on his face felt almost pointless. His phone’s puny light wasn’t helping all that much, either, leaving him to reach out and set his hand against the wall to his left, using it as a guide. A hallway, if he had to guess, and a fairly narrow one at that. The thick fabric of his glove caught on something and he stopped, leaning forward to inspect what turned out to be a moldering flap of old, faded wallpaper. That was when his heart leapt into his throat.

A normal person might’ve been worried about…shit, asbestos? Black mold? ( _Whatever the fuck_ was in the mix of crap turning the front of his mask into a carcinogenic Pollack painting.) None of that even pinged on his radar.

The hallway opened up into a wider space only a few yards later. There was a shape immediately in front of him, and dark as the room was, old-timey as the _thing_ before him was, he recognized it instantly.

Just like that, all at once, he knew what this was.

He knew _where_ he was.

A finger of cold slid up his spine. He could hear the girls’ laughter in his ears, bright, resounding, _alive_ , close enough that he wouldn’t have been surprised if one reached out and touched the back of his shoulder. Would they have laughed like that if they’d known that they’d _all_ been wrong about what Bob’s storage room had been hiding from them?

Above his mask, his eyes burned and streamed from the dust (and _only_ the dust), making it hard to pick out the other shapes his light fell on as he navigated the room on shaky legs. Underneath the mask, though, his mouth trembled from the force of his grin.

Whatever disappointment he’d felt curdling his guts before was gone in a blink, replaced by an excitement he hadn’t been able to feel in…

_Fuck_ …

A long-ass time.

How long had he been sitting there in the basement, oblivious to the wonder hiding under the floorboards? How many shitty floor plans had he drawn up for his characters to bumble through, only to tear them to jagged pieces before even _finishing_ them, completely unaware that all he needed to do was kick down a door or two to find _exactly_ what he needed?

Still, it was only the one thought that kept coming back to him as he stood in the remnants of the old Blackwood resort, staring at a dumbwaiter no one had set eyes on since before his parents’ time. They had been wrong. They had been _so_ wrong.

And he had never once in his life been so _happy_ to realize that.

“Fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” he said, voice low and reverent as a worshipper kneeling before an altar. “Sorry, haunted mansion, there’s a new lady in town. Hello, abandoned hotel…” he reached forward, hooking his gloved fingers into the solid metal grate covering the dumbwaiter and giving it an experimental shake. “It’s very nice to meet you. This might be a bit forward but uh, I think you and me are gonna be _real_ good friends.”

He was going to need to make a map.

***

**Thursday, September 11, 2014**  
**Late afternoon**

“Something has been troubling me since our last session.”

What a surprise. Josh leaned against the back of the chair, lacing his fingers together and using his palms as a makeshift sleep mask to cover his face. “Oh yeah? Just the _one_ thing? If it’s just _one_ thing that’s been bugging you, Alan, then boy howdy, that sure sounds like we’ve been making some progress together. Kudos all around!”

It was difficult to tell whether Hill laughed or not; there was a rustling sound from in front of him, followed by a hollow _thunk_. Josh knew _that_ noise—it was one of those little things that had wormed its way into his psyche after enough time and repetition, like...like the sound of Linda struggling to turn the key the right way in the lock of the front door, or the sound of Chris’s SUV pulling into the driveway. It was something he knew without having to try.

The metronome.

He felt himself sit a bit straighter at the sound…and then immediately sank back into his slouch with a defiant kind of purpose. Since _when_ was he one of Pavlov’s stupid mutts? Please. _As if_. Now, did the metronome _always_ mean Hill was about to do one of his ridiculous ‘exercises?’ Yes. Had it ever been brought out and then _not_ used for one of said ‘exercises?’ No.

So was it then _reasonable_ that it made him react like that? Sure. Fine. Whatever. That didn’t mean he had to _like_ it.

“Do you ever think about how imperfect memory is?”

Josh frowned under the mask of his hands. “…gonna need a little clarification on that one.”

“Memory! One of the singlemost important—and singlemost _flawed_ —functions of the mind. We rely on it day in and day out to do _everything_. Memory is necessary to carry out almost every aspect of our daily lives: To turn off the alarm clock, we must remember _how_ to turn it off; to make our coffee, we must remember to add the grounds before running the machine; to ensure we have food to eat, we must remember the items on our grocery list when we get to the store…so on and so forth. We _need_ our memory, and yet it fails us more than _any other_ mental process. Intriguing, wouldn’t you say?”

“Guess so.”

“There’s some irony in that, isn’t there? Something we rely wholly upon, something we are rendered almost helpless without, and it’s the very thing with the greatest capacity to betray us. To let us down.”

“You must be an absolute _blast_ at parties.”

The room went silent. Entirely silent. Something about it _ached_ inside his head, calling to mind the haunting quiet that came with diving into the deep end of a pool. He had to fight the ridiculous sensation that there was water pressing against his eardrums.

“You’re not taking this seriously enough, Joshua,” Hill sighed, breaking the strange spell that had fallen over the room.

All at once, his ears felt fine again—he shook himself out as he had when Pavlov’s dogs had first occurred to him. It was just another bullshit psychological thing…he was _expecting_ the metronome to be tick-tocking away, so _any_ quiet was going to feel more intense than it actually was. That was all. He was _expecting_ to hear ticking and there wasn’t any. That was _it_. God, he needed to get over himself. He took in a deep breath, speaking on the wind of his exhale, “I’m taking it _plenty_ serious! I had a great-uncle with Alzheimer’s. It was super tragic. I get how impor—”

“No, no, _no!_ ” Hill’s chair groaned as he (ostensibly) angled himself to better face him. “You misunderstand my point. I’m not talking about _dysfunction_ or _disease_ of memory. Even the healthiest person in the prime of their mental ability is betrayed by their memory time and time again. It’s one of the mind’s cruelest tricks, you see…because memory _rarely_ tells us that it is wrong or that it is lacking. It rarely gives us reason to question or doubt what it is telling us. No, it makes us double-down and become even _more_ confident in our mistakes. The people who tend to suffer the _most_ at the hands of their own…” But he didn’t finish his sentence. Josh could hear the dull, papery sound of Hill tapping his index fingers together in thought. “…well, no. How about…yes, all right, how about _this_. You’re well versed in psychological phenomena, aren’t you? You certainly enjoy _acting_ as though you are…”

Was that a _joke?_ Was Alan cracking _jokes?_ What a day!

Josh scoffed, “Uh, why does that sound like a _challenge?_ I seem to detect a hint of doubt in your voice, Alan, and I’m not sure I appreciate it, my good man.” He chuckled as he continued, “Of _course_ I know the biz! C’mon, what kind of aspiring horror prodigy _doesn’t_ know shit about psych?”

“Perhaps the sort under the impression that one must _aspire_ to be a prodigy, hmm?”

“Oof! Man, here I was, thinking shrinks were supposed to be _nice_.”

“Let me pose this question to _you_ , then—consider it a quiz! How much have you retained from your Introduction to Psychology course?” The papers on the desk rustled; as though he were actually looking at him, Josh could perfectly visualize the way Hill would be leaning forward (elbows on the desk, fingers laced, eyes keen). “What sort of person, Joshua, _most often_ falls victim to false memories?”

He heaved a performative sigh and shook his head slowly. In the furthest recesses of his brain, he flipped through stacks of study guides, trying to bring to mind what class it had been where they’d discussed this. “Aw man, this _reeks_ of a trick question…” he drawled, buying himself time when the answer didn’t immediately occur to him. “Do I get any extra credit points for being right? Or like…do I win a pizza party for the rest of the class?” He snickered a low laugh as something clicked. “I’m pretty sure it’s the super emotional ones, right? They don’t really like, uh, _encode_ the event. All they get is how it made them _feel_ , so when they _need_ to remember something, all they get is ‘Aw shit, that was when I got real mad.’” Hill didn’t respond right away, so Josh continued. “ _Ash_ is like that, y’know. _Everything_ is just _always_ filtered through that emotion lens. ‘This made _me_ sad, this made _me_ mad.’ So God help you if you’re asking about anyone _else’s_ feelings. That shit doesn’t even get _recorded_.”

“I’m sensing some bitterness.”

“Man, you’re good at your job. How much student debt did you pile up while learning the skills needed to so effectively pick apart my oh-so-clever ruses?”

“For the time being, I’m going to need you to put a pin in the topic of your friends. We’ll get to them sooner or later—oh, please believe me that we will _get_ to them—but what I want from you _right now_ is your answer to my question. Was that it? People who allow themselves to feel their emotions more intensely than, perhaps, _you_ do?”

“More _intensely…_ ” The snort was derisive, cold. Josh was _glad_ he’d covered the better part of his face earlier.

Hill cleared his throat, bringing Josh back into the present.

“Final answer, Alan.”

“Ah. I see. No pizza party, then, I’m afraid.”

“Well _fuck_.”

Another high-pitched creak came from Hill’s chair, sounding just a bit _too_ pained for comfort. “Would you care to hazard a second guess? Unfortunately there are no consolation prizes for me to offer.”

He slouched further down into his own seat as though to counteract Alan’s lean. “Y’know, not for nothing, but I dropped out of school for a _reason_. I’m not _saying_ pop quizzes _were_ that reason…and I’m _also_ not saying they didn’t contribute. So…”

“ _Creatives_. Imagination is the bane of memory. The more you think back on something, the more you picture it in your mind, the more likely it is that you contaminate it with your own fictionalized details. Oh, we never _mean_ to do it—something about the creative mind simply _must_ fill gaps when it notices them! So perhaps the movie in your head substitutes the shirt you can’t quite recall with the shirt you most enjoy wearing. Perhaps you never _quite_ understood _why_ an event occurred…the same mental film might begin providing you _‘clues’_ to help you answer that question.”

It was, admittedly, beginning to sound familiar…not that any of his psych professors had ever sounded anything like Hill. _No one_ ever really sounded anything like Hill. Josh raised his shoulders. “This your way of telling me I shouldn’t trust my own brain?”

“All I’m saying is that it is certainly a dangerous pastime for people like you.”

“The _creatives._ ” It was impossible _not_ to smile when saying the word. It had a good ring to it, a good mouth-feel. Josh-Wash, the Prince of Horror, a _bona fide_ creative. A few more accolades tacked onto _that_ shit, and he’d be in Targaryen territory.

“The creatives,” Hill agreed, papers rustling under his elbows, “And the very, _very_ damaged.”

Under the safety of his hands, Josh opened his eyes. **  
**

Hill didn’t give him time enough to respond. “Memory is what I am interested in today, Joshua. _Your_ memory. Let us see what the movie reel behind your eyes can reveal to us, shall we? Now, I’m going to need you to concentrate. This will work best, I think, if you keep your eyes closed.” A beat of silence. Then the metronome began, rhythmic and insistent. “I want you to focus on the sound. I’m going to ask you a few questions. Nothing _too_ difficult, I can assure you. Your answers should be the very first thoughts that occur to you, even if they are unrelated to the question at hand.”

“I—yeah. Sure.” The corners of Josh’s mouth tucked downwards into a confused slash. That last comment had rankled him, rustled his jimmies, so to speak. “Sure.” He kept his eyes closed but folded his arms across his chest, shivering briefly when the chilly air hit his face.

The ticking of the metronome seemed to fill every corner of the room. Distantly, he wondered if Hill had gotten a new one since the last time he’d lugged it out onto the desk. The tempo was slower than he had expected it would’ve been, and each tick was unfamiliar, scratchy with the suggestion of something almost…metallic.

Hill’s voice droned over ( _behind?_ ) the sound, quiet but perfectly audible. “What is your earliest memory?”

“Um.” There was an uncomfortable twinge as a deep muscle twitch started in his eyebrow. His imagination—his _creative_ imagination—gave him the strange idea that it was twitching in time with the metronome. “Jumping on my bed. Had to be like…four, five. I was supposed to be napping, I think. Ma was too busy with the twins to check on me, though, so I just sorta did whatever. I felt like such a badass, jumping on that stupid bed.”

A faint scratching from Hill’s fountain pen. He couldn’t help but wonder what about that answer had required _notes_ to be taken. “What is your happiest memory?”

“Happ _iest?_ That’s—”

“Ah…”

Had his eyes been open, Josh would’ve rolled them. He furrowed his brow to try and stop the weird twitching before it could drive him insane. “Okay, uh. Ba…yeah, baseball on the front lawn. Back in the old days, the four of us would play and Ma would watch. We were all _awful_ …there was the one time Beth actually got a piece of the ball, right, but she managed to hit it _right_ into Bob’s hip. He _crumpled!_ He was _fine_ , but shit, we laughed. I mean Beth didn’t. The rest of us did.”

More scratching. He had an idea of what the notes would be about _that_ time. “What is one especially vibrant memory from your childhood?”

Josh reached up to press his fingers against the muscle spasm, trying his best to rub it away. “There was, uh…there was the time in grade school where Cochise and I figured out you could make a flamethrower with spray deodorant. Went through a whole bag of those little green army guys…and then a handful of Hannah’s Barbies. But there are always casualties in war, aren’t there?” He laughed despite not feeling it in the slightest. The exercise was leaving a bad taste in his mouth, and something about the metronome (in combination with whatever was going on with his eyebrow) was only making it worse.

“What do you remember from that weekend up on the mountain?”

His fingers pushed harder against his face, making his sinuses ache. “Fuck you, Alan.”

“Ah, ah…I thought you intended to participate in good faith? Just answer the question with the first thing that pops into your mind. What do you remember from last year’s disastrous party?”

The metronome felt impossibly loud, impossibly close to his eardrums. “It was cold. I got drunk. Threw up in the sink. Next question.”

“There’s that bitterness rearing its ugly head again! Interesting, interesting…I’ll get more specific, perhaps that will help. I—” Hill grew quiet just in time for him to hear a new noise, a _perplexing_ noise, a noise that came not from the desk in front of him, but the door behind him. “Oh, is it that time already? You really must forgive me, I’d lose track of my own head if it wasn’t so firmly attached to my shoulders…eyes closed, now, Joshua.”

Like a kid caught cheating by the teacher, Josh jumped a mile out of his skin, covering his eyes with his hands. It was likely more surprise than obedience—somehow the rationale did little to curb the hot flush of humiliation crawling up into his face.

The door closed with a barely noticeable rush of air. “I suppose I should’ve warned you that today’s session would be a bit… _unconventional_. I’m sure you can understand my apprehension with that, of course, all things considered. This will be an uncomfortable exercise for you, but if I may be frank, you should be _thankful!_ Usually I charge a _significantly_ higher fee for family counseling.”

Oh no.

Oh _nonononono_.

He had _not_ brought Bob and Linda into this. There was no _way_ he’d done that.

How the fuck was he supposed to react? His teeth clicked together loudly as he chomped down on nothing at all, realizing his jaw had been hanging slack. None of his thoughts were lining up the way they needed to, instead becoming a whirlwind of useless pieces-parts: _what the fuck, doctor-patient confidentiality, have they been listening the whole time, what the fuck, this can’t be ethical, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the FUCK_.

“So now that we’re all together, let’s try this again, shall we? What do you remember about the party?”

All at once, he was horribly aware of a presence just to his left. A second later, there was one just to his right. He couldn’t see them, couldn’t hear them, but he could feel that subtle shift in the air, the ethereal buzz of skin so close it might brush against him at any moment. His tongue was a salted slug trying desperately to escape down the back of his throat.

Hill released a frustrated sigh. “I simply do not understand why you’re insisting on being so _difficult_ today, Joshua, truly you’re only hurting yourself by refusing to come to terms with these things. But no matter! Today we have guests who understand the importance of the truth, _cold_ and _hard_ though it may be.” He cleared his throat in that prim way of his, directing his voice to the Washington at Josh’s right side. “What do _you_ remember from the party?”

What? There was nothing _for_ his parents to remember from the party. They hadn’t _been_ there. How could Hill expect them to—

“The story of the Blackwood Sanatorium. It’s an oldie but a _goodie_.”

That was not his mother’s voice.

Shock was what drove him to drop his hands, to open his eyes, to look to the source of the voice; shock that was already so deep, so intense, that his only reaction to the sight of the figure was a vague sense of numbness.

His brain wanted to believe it was a lamp. It wasn’t. The shape was wrong. There were subtle curves underneath the dustsheet that seemed to suggest a skull, a spine, shoulders—things that very few lamps came standard with.

As he stared, he heard Hill pose the question again, that time to whatever was looming off to Josh’s left side. “And what do _you_ remember from the party?”

He couldn’t move. His eyes were riveted on the burial shroud, on the unnatural way it seemed to be sucking inwards towards a hidden, hungry mouth. The longer he looked, the more he noticed, the more he wished he could tear himself away. Something was seeping through the sheet in forked veins, staining the fabric the nauseating color of an old bruise. Whatever lurked beneath it reeked of old dirt and rotting roots, the overwhelmingly _green_ odor of a planting shed in the worst of summer’s heat, burning his throat until each breath he sucked in tasted like gasoline.

The voice on his left answered Hill in a voice that absolutely was not his father’s. “You promised you’d look out for me. You said you’d be my wolf pack. _You promised_.”

“Well, there you have it! Now, I think this raises an _excellent_ follow-up question! Why is it, do you think, that it’s easier for me to question a couple of corpses than _you_ , Joshua? Why do you think that is?”

His gaze snapped to Hill as though driven by some invisible force, and it was only at that moment that he realized why the metronome had sounded so _off_. There _was_ no metronome on Hill’s desk. The sound had never been ticking at all, but the rhythmic turning of an old key—not the sort that fit into _doors_ , of course, the sort that you had to wind to prime a—

He gasped, dropping the music box as though it were a bomb; it fell back onto Hannah’s desk with a loud _clonk!_ sound, the lid jiggling but sticking open. The ballerina spun round and round, the tinny melody of _Frère Jacques_ suddenly impossibly loud in the empty room. Three lifetimes came and went as he stood in front of the desk, eyes wide and muscles tight, watching the dancer twirl in place. When he _was_ able to wrench his eyes away from the box, he spun in his own unsteady circle, head whipping around in a mad attempt to catch sight of anyone (or any _thing_ ) else who might’ve been in the room with him. But there was no one. Nothing. He was alone with the plastic ballerina and the dusty memory of his sheet ghost sisters.

His body recognized what was about to happen _long_ before he did. Josh staggered out of Hannah’s room on shaky legs, only just barely making it into the bathroom before the lining of his stomach gave a deep, painful lurch.

One cough, one retch, and it was over as quickly as it began. He clung weakly to the countertop as he hung his head over the sink basin, eyes screwed shut in some vain attempt to _concentrate_ the nausea away. Fat chance of _that_. The rooms were close enough that he could still hear the faint tune of the music box through the open door, showing no sign of slowing—and why _would_ it? For all he knew, he could’ve been turning its key for minutes, hours, _days_ , so that sucker could still be playing by _next week._

If he had to keep listening to that goddamn song, he was going to bash his brains in. No part of him wanted to step foot back into Hannah’s room, but he could probably just inch his way over to her door and pull it shut. Yeah. Yeah, he could do that. He wouldn’t even need to step over the threshold. It would only take a second, _maybe_ two, and then he could scuttle his way back downstairs like the terrified little baby he was.

But God.

_God_.

He could see it so clearly in his mind’s eye: Reaching for the doorknob only to have a hand, emaciated almost beyond recognition, grab onto his wrist with all the desperate strength of rigor mortis. It would pull him back into the darkness, back towards the music box and its endless song, the door locking behind him to turn the bedroom into a mausoleum.

Maybe Linda was right. Maybe he _did_ need to stop watching so many horror movies.

Josh let his forehead rest against the faucet, the metal growing cool as he ran the tap. He didn’t open his eyes again until the water had time enough to swirl whatever he’d horked up down the drain. “Shit… _shit_.” Cupping his hands under the water, he splashed his face, rinsed his mouth out, did everything in his power to avoid looking at himself in the mirror. It was easy enough to imagine the sorry state he’d find himself in. He didn’t need to _see_ it to believe it.

The bathroom went eerily quiet once he turned the water off, but if he strained his ears, he could definitely still hear the horrible thing on Hannah’s desk. Fuck it. He was better than all this fear.

In a few defiant strides, he made his way back to her door. He wasn’t proud of it, but he turned his head as he reached for the knob, staring pointedly at the wall to avoid so much as peeking into the room. His fingers found purchase. He yanked the door shut until it clicked. The song cut out abruptly.

( _Ding dang dong, ding da…_ )

It wasn’t until he stepped back into the hall that he realized how _dark_ it had gotten. The pit of his stomach filled with the familiar weight of uncertainty. Nothing in the weather report had suggested rain or even clouds, so that would have to mean the sun had already set, but…that couldn’t…that couldn’t be right. When he’d first sat down with Hill—

_No_. No, that wasn’t right either. He _hadn’t_ sat down with Hill. Hill had sent him a very polite, if not stilted, text over the weekend to inform him he had to cancel their session that week. What had happened back there was…not Hill. Hill was probably at home with a ‘touch of a bug,’ or whatever the fuck his excuse had been. He _hadn’t_ been with _Hill,_ so the real question was hat had he been doing _before_ …that?

Josh closed his eyes, leaning his head against the bathroom’s doorframe. Picking through the chaos thrumming inside of him felt futile, like digging through an industrial-sized dumpster in search of a lost earring. His blood rushed in his ears, his throat burned with bile, his skin was hot enough to boil his organs, his heartbeat seemed to be tapping out a panicked signal in Morse. No matter how hard he strained his brain, the only images that came back to him were of Hill and the twins.

When he opened his eyes, he was struck again by the darkness of the lodge. He stood there for the better part of a minute, perfectly still, perfectly silent, and forced himself to do nothing but _breathe._ It would be easier to think if he was calm—not _easy,_ maybe, but eas _ier_. Okay. All right. Okay.

All right.

His pulse continued to tick away in his ears, but it served as a comforting kind of counterpoint to the metronome ( _music box_ ), each whoosh of blood reminding him that he was alive, he was fine, he was _real_. The spasm in his eyebrow had come back with a vengeance, and he reached up to press the heel of his hand hard against it. He pushed until his skin ached. And while it didn’t stop the twitching, it, too, provided a modicum of relief. Shit didn’t hurt in dreams.

Not that he had been _dreaming_.

That wasn’t helping.

He pushed the thought from his mind as best he could, again trying to get a grip on the situation at hand. The third floor was _dark_ , yeah, but it was hardly pitch black…there was enough light filtering through the slats of the blinds for him to be able to see. It was dim, though, casting the hall in a decidedly spooky blue-gray glow. So it was nighttime. Dusk, maybe. Or—oh, shit, _duh_. Feeling as though he was moving through water, Josh brought his right hand down from his forehead, blinking hard until he could read the face of his watch.

“ _Oookay_ …” It was an exhale taking on the shape of a word, hardly a shred of his voice audible behind his teeth. Past nine. What the _fuck_. He slowly made his way to the window, each step delicate, careful, as though trying not to bring attention to himself. Logically, he knew he was alone. Blackwood was empty. But logic wasn’t currently the loudest voice in his head. He crept forward at a snail’s pace, half-expecting to hear the frantic (familiar) slamming of his sisters’ footsteps chasing after him. They’d grab him from behind with their slimy, skeletal fingers gripping harder and harder, causing what little skin they had left to slough off, leaving reeking smears of blood to soak into the fabric of his t-shirt and _spread_ like poisonous spores, and…

He made it to the window unharmed. Drawing the blinds as high as they could go, Josh peered out into the—yeah, _surprise_ —darkened tree line. The latch was a little tricky for his trembling fingers, but he managed to undo it all the same; outside, the air smelled of pine and the promise of a cold snap. His eyes scanned the yard while the sweat on his face cooled into a tacky mask.

“I was in the theater.” It seemed to come back to him piece-by-piece as the racing of his heart returned to a more normal rhythm. He’d spent the morning exploring the labyrinth of the old hotel to build his map, only stopping when he’d found himself in what must’ve once been a kitchen or restaurant, the walls and floors made of slick tile. There’d been some shit that looked _suspiciously_ like black mold creeping along the fixtures, so he’d done an about-face and made a note to bring… _something_ to help with that on his next visit. He’d chucked his dust mask, peeled out of the coveralls and gloves, taken the hottest shower he could bear, and then crashed himself in the back row of the cinema, legs stretched across the seat next to him as he watched _The Silence of the Lambs_ for roughly the ten-thousandth time.

And now it was well past nine.

He could’ve been sleepwalking, so maybe that was it. Yeah… _yeah!_ It had been a long, strenuous couple of days. Going up and down all those stairs…trying to vacuum up _some_ of the dust…picking through the wreckage of a resort like an archaeologist at a dig site. He’d fallen asleep during one of Lecter’s psychological asides and it had fed his subconscious until it belched Hill out. Two flights of stairs were, admittedly, a lot to climb while asleep, but this was his family’s second home! People _joked_ about shit being so familiar that they could do it in their sleep, right? So…

So.

Something in the forest _screamed_. Every hair on his body stood on end, the ancient lizard part of his brain overriding everything else. He’d heard the same shriek before, usually while lying awake on the couch or pacing the porch, and without fail, he always found himself thinking the same thing: _Is that a person?_

But of course it wasn’t _._ There were so many things that lived in those woods, hiding until darkness fell and they emerged from their dens to hunt. Mountain lions screamed. Foxes screamed. Owls screamed. Hell, if they got mad enough, sometimes even _deer_ could scream (a thirty-second YouTube search had showed him that much).

Tell that to caveman-brain, though. His muscles turned into concrete beneath his skin, tightening his throat to keep from breathing, lest the predator lying in wait take notice of him. The feeling was a fleeting one. Josh shook the nervous energy out of his extremities, allowing himself the indignity of a childlike shudder in the wake of it all. All he needed was to get some sleep. If he got a good night’s sleep, then he could figure everything else out _tomorrow_ , with a clearer head. Josh pulled the window closed and did the latch, frowning when something caught his attention from the darkness of the woods.

For a second, maybe less, he could’ve _sworn_ he’d seen two eyes shining brightly outside the lodge. There was no reason for that to put him as on-edge as it did…after all, mountain lions’ eyes glowed. Foxes’ eyes glowed. Owls’ eyes glowed. Deer’s eyes glowed. Still, he failed to suppress another shiver, going so far as to pull the blinds down over the window again.

He shuffled his way down the stairs to the great room, clicking on every lamp as he went. He shut the blinds, checked the locks, curled up on the couch, and desperately tried to convince his eyes to grow heavy. When they didn’t, when he was instead forced to come to terms with his own mistake, he reached into his bag and rummaged around until he found the bottle he was looking for.

***

**Friday, September 12, 2014**  
**10:06am**

By the time he left the guest cabin, he’d been awake for…longer than he would’ve liked.

He pulled the door shut behind him and turned the key in the lock, thoughts already a million miles away. _That_ was a bummer—the trip to the cabin had been meant to _clear_ his head, not muddle it further. His hope had been that if he’d gotten out of the lodge, out of the _basement_ , away from his character sheets and sketches, it would be easier to think about his project. There was a certain kind of pressure that came with having the beast stare you right in the eye, and more to the point, the lodge’s furniture was making him uncomfortable.

Josh literally stopped in his tracks as _that_ thought occurred to him. “ _Really_ , dude?” he asked himself with an exasperated roll of his eyes. “ _Really?_ ” He sucked his teeth and kept walking, forcing the ghostly silhouettes of the chairs and their draping dustsheets out of his mind.

He had waited too long to take his meds again, that was all. Should he have been more careful? Sure. Obviously. He should’ve _noticed_ , too, given the absolutely _stunning_ grocery list of withdrawal side effects he’d been exhibiting, but that was the _fun_ thing about psych meds, wasn’t it? Shit was clear as day once the chemicals all started balancing out—in _retrospect_ it was _super_ easy to step back and say ‘Oh shit, my bad, that was some textbook aggression, wasn’t it, my good dude? I can see now that I have perhaps been behaving impulsively!’ What that little label on the bottle _didn’t_ warn about, though, what Hill himself hadn’t warned about, was that retrospect didn’t really help when you were mid-hallucination.

Unless it _hadn’t_ been a hallucination.

But it had been. He _knew_ it had been. Knew it in that tiny, unpleasant wrinkle in the very back of his brain that _always_ managed bring attention to the shit he wanted to avoid. It was the same wrinkle, he thought, where the truth about his screenplay had been wriggling about for the past week.

He was going to have to deal with _that_ bullshit sooner or later (not that he was trying avoid thinking about last night). Ugh. The reality of the situation was that he needed to reformat it. Again. From the very beginning, he’d sworn up and down that it wasn’t meant to be a novel or a short story or whatever-the-fuck English majors called them, that prose wasn’t his cup of tea, that Josh Washington writing actual sentences in actual _paragraphs_ was a laughable thought…but shit, man. It was starting to make sense why ‘screenplay adapter’ was a legit profession. Not as easy as the hacks on tv made it seem.

That had been another reason he’d trekked up to the guest cabin—in his life, he’d found it was always just a _teeny_ bit easier to accept bad news when you were physically exhausted. The trip to the cabin was bad enough with all of its twists and turns, but going _back_ was downright dangerous in places. People didn’t usually fall _up_ mountains, after all. Down, though? Oh, he could fall down a mountain, no sweat. Some part of him knew that by the time he made it back to the (relative) safety of the lodge, he’d be more willing to accept all the reworks. At the very least, he’d be able to resign himself to the idea of it, and that was half the battle right there.

His mind bounced back to Hannah’s bedroom, and no matter how hard he tried to shake it loose, he couldn’t seem to dislodge it. That was the worst part of the meds, really. The withdrawal sucked when he’d been off them too long, the brain fog sucked when he’d been _on_ them too long, but the first day or two when he was getting _back_ on them? Where his body was trying to make sense of the chemical invaders suddenly trying to regulate shit? That was the _worst_. He was either too detached or too invested in everything, his focus razor-sharp but fleeting. They were the days where he felt the most miserable. Worse, they were the days where he caught himself crying at the drop of a hat, like some kind of baby.

So he fought to keep the movie reel in his head away from the parts with his sisters. Thinking about not-Hill ( _almost_ -Hill?) wasn’t comfortable, but it was better. There was something cosmically unfair about getting lectured by his psychiatrist even when he wasn’t around. It probably said something about who he was as a person…and hoo boy, _that_ would be a good topic to unpack with the _real_ Hill, wouldn’t it? Josh could just about picture it: Swaggering into Hill’s office next week, plopping down into his usual seat far from the couch and its box of tissues. He’d spread his hands wide and say, with _nary a trace_ of humor, ‘Well Alan, my good man, I _do_ have something I’d like to talk about today. Whaddya think it means when a guy hallucinates his own shrink to yell at him? That’s gotta mean _something_ , wouldn’t you say? It doesn’t feel like a _great_ sign, if you ask me, but uh, _you’re_ the shrink, so…whatcha got for me?’

Oh, it was _too_ easy to imagine his face.

He snorted a laugh, his breath forming a tiny cloud in front of his face. If nothing else, it was sort of impressive how convincing almost-Hill was. Apparently he _had_ been paying attention in his psych courses if he was able to conjure up a droning old coot like Alan with that sort of precision and accuracy. It _did_ make sense in a sick sort of way. The only solid difference between the hack horror writers and the greats was an understanding of what made people tick. Made sense that he knew more than he’d given himself credit for, hmm?

The more he thought on it, the lighter the weight on his shoulders felt. There had to be a way to make all of that work for him. The best horror, the _good_ shit, was drawn off of real-life—that was why so many hokey flicks started off with the old standby warning. ‘ **BASED ON TRUE EVENTS** ’ got those hearts pitter-pattering like nobody’s business. It didn’t even matter if what they were talking about didn’t actually happen, the scary part was that it _could_. It _could_ happen. To anyone!

Could almost-Hill happen to anyone, though? Now there was an interesting idea.

A real interesting idea.

Josh paused on the path, letting his bag slide down his shoulder so he could rummage through it until he found his phone. The notes app on his phone was clogged with all manner of reminders, ranging from the practical (‘dust buster + LOTS of bags’) to the artistic (‘palette for char cost – dk blues/blacks/greens? contr w blood a+’) to the absolutely nonsensical (‘shellfish???????’). It was the second one he tapped on, opening up the long-running list of notes for his story. He started a new line, sucking on his teeth while trying to think of how to best phrase it for later. After a few seconds of hemming and hawing, he fired off a few quick words: ‘psycho juxta…shrink?’

It was something to think about, anyway.

He slipped his phone into his pants pocket and started walking again, mulling over a few other issues he knew he’d have to deal with eventually. More specifically, he tried working through a tongue-and-cheek explanation for how his band of merry teenage assholes could plausibly go a whole night without being able to contact the cops in that, the year of our Lord, 2014. Shit was so much simpler in the 80’s and 90’s, when phone lines could just be snipped, sending protagonists and ancillary characters alike spiraling into hysterics.

It was odd that he noticed it at all, really, as he’d been walking with his head down and eyes on the path, trying to avoid loose rocks or animal burrows or stretches of the path slick with premature frost; but all at once, a strong sense of _wrongness_ had overcome him, prickling its way up his arms and neck in static snaps to fill him with sinking dread. Just as he’d felt the night before when he’d heard the scream, some prehistoric part of his brainstem had taken the reins, putting an abrupt end to any thoughts of continuing down the path.

Only that wasn’t it at all _._ No, it hadn’t been a suggestion, but an imperative: _Do not move._

That was when he noticed the shards of plywood sticking out of the muddy brush. Strangely enough, there wasn’t so much as a _moment_ of confusion on his part. Oh, he knew what he was seeing without fully _knowing_ , if that made any sort of goddamn sense at all—what he couldn’t figure out was _why_ he was seeing it.

Josh looked carefully up the path. Nothing. He looked down the way he’d come from. Nothing. His eyes found the ruined plywood again.

“Now _this_ …” he muttered to himself, taking a _very_ tentative step forward, “…is what we in the biz would call ‘ _a red flag._ ’” Already knowing what to expect, he quickened his pace and craned his neck, feeling his forehead crease when it finally came into view.

The damnedest thing was that he was still surprised when he saw it. Feeling very much like a little kid, he reached up and rubbed at his eyes, peeking through the spaces of his fingers as though anticipating it to fizzle out like a mirage. It didn’t. No, oh _no_ , he was seeing _precisely_ what he thought he was seeing.

The entrance to the old mines was… _open_.

“Don’t like _that_. Don’t like that at _all_ , actually.” His hands had found their way into the pockets of his vest where he busied his fingers with bunching and unbunching the padded material. This had to be a joke, right? Some kind of cosmic goof-em-up where the universe tested, what—his survival instinct? His common sense? He took a careful step forward, then another, approaching the gaping maw of the mine with all the apprehension of a sinner in church. The last time he’d been by, the entrance had been completely boarded up. _Big_ boards, too, the heavy kind, not the sort you could just pluck away if you really put your mind to it. And yet…there it was. _Open_.

Well now, this? This was…this was heebying all of his jeebies.

He stared into the mine for what could’ve been thirty seconds but just as easily could’ve been thirty minutes, not sure whether or not he was feeling froggy enough to chance getting closer. What was he going to do if he walked in there and found a hungry wolf trying to catch some z’s, huh? What _then?_ Or worse, what was he going to do if he walked in there and found the _rest_ of the boards stacked up all nice and neat, a toolbox hidden off to the side, a crowbar leaning against the rocky wall? What was he going to do if he came face-to-face with some sort of proof that he _wasn’t_ as alone in Blackwood as he’d assumed?

Yeah, _no_. No thank you. Not today. Hard pass.

He didn’t go in. He might’ve been a horror buff, that Josh Washington, but he wasn’t a fucking _idiot_. Exploring the remnants of the old hotel was one thing—stepping foot into a mine that had been caved-in (not to mention _condemned_ ) for half a century was another.

Josh kept his hands in his pockets while he continued staring into the mine, trying to will his feet to begin moving towards the lodge. For the first time that week, the problems with his story couldn’t have been farther from his mind. As he looked into the dark, yawning mouth of the mountain, his thoughts were elsewhere entirely. He thought about the radio reports of the bodies found in the thaw. He thought about the scream, the eyes, the horrendous feeling of being watched from the window. He thought about the way Linda had been complaining about someone wandering the property last winter. He thought about the mythology book he’d taken from the guest cabin, and the passage he’d dog-eared. He thought about the story of the Blackwood Sanatorium, which was an oldie but a _goodie_. Mostly, though…mostly he wondered why all of those things were so _connected to each other_ in his head.

***

**Monday, September 15, 2014**  
**7:23pm**

Mondays were not her best days. Now, was that her fault? Sure! Probably. She had, after all, had not one, not two, but _three_ people warning her ( _repeatedly_ , at that) about the ins and outs of college life. And their advice had been super good! Don’t sign up for morning classes, don’t take more than fifteen credit hours each semester, don’t volunteer for jack _shit_ unless you’re getting extra credit for it, don’t wear your lanyard around your neck unless you want _everyone_ to know you’re a freshman.

Great advice!

Great advice that she had absolutely ignored at every turn. Sure, one of her core classes started at 8:00am, but like…she’d woken up earlier than that for high school and always been fine! And okay, so there was a lecture course that started at 5:15pm, but she was a night owl anyway! She’d be able to make it work! And— _and!_ If she was being totally honest, she _had_ only signed up for fifteen credits at first, but her schedule had just looked so… _empty!_ If she took another class (or two), then she wouldn’t have to wait so long between classes, and she’d always have something to occupy her time, and she’d even probably graduate earlier, and…

Yeah, none of that was really cutting the mustard right now. As she stared up at her ceiling, Ashley couldn’t help but wonder _why_ she’d gone and done all of that. What was the _point?_ What had she been trying to _prove?!_

She folded her pillow over her head and closed her eyes, letting her body go well and fully lax for the first time that day. No one ever claimed that the life of an over-achiever was an easy one.

Muted through the pillow as it was, her phone gave a buzz loud enough to be heard, jittering against the wood of her desk. She sat back up with a zombie-like moan, craning her head to try and make out what the notification on her screen said. Ugh. It was too far away. Of course. She pushed herself off of her bed, whining all the while, the sound growing in volume until she finally managed to grab her phone. It was one of the benefits of having an absentee roommate—making whatever weirdass noises you wanted.

“Whuh-oh,” she muttered, seeing the text that’d just come in.

Sam  
  
Hey I know this is super short notice but can I come hang out  
Yeah absolutely!  
Is everything okay??  
Fine  
Its fine  
Ill explain when Im there just  
Itll be maybe five min  
Okay… :\  


Cue the panic attack. What _was_ it about people that made them _insist_ on sending vague texts? Why couldn’t they just come out and say what was going on? She sat on her bed again, staring down at the dark screen until she couldn’t look at her own cringing face any longer. She’d been trying to work on talking herself out of the worst of the anxiety lately, and Sam had been something of a godsend on that account, but come on. _Come on!_ A fat lot of good her advice did when she was sending out ambiguous texts all willy-nilly like that!

She all but jumped out of her skin when Sam knocked. “Coming!” Ashley checked her phone on her way to the door just to confirm a hunch, and yup, true to her word, Sam had hit the five minute mark with a shocking precision. “Hey, you’re right on ti—oh my God, what happened?” When she opened the door, the look on Sam’s face hit her like a punch to the jaw. It was something she wasn’t sure she’d _ever_ seen from her…not anger, not _quite_ , but in the same vein of distress. “Wha-what, what? What’s going on?”

Sam slid into the room, shaking her head nonstop. Though the shape was _mostly_ right, she was showing way too many teeth to actually be smiling. “It’s been…a _trying_ day,” she answered, continuing the pattern of vague, mysterious responses. There wasn’t a whole lot of room in the dorm, but she managed to pace the length of it briskly twice before Ashley closed the door behind them. “Are you familiar with the concept of, uh…” Sam stopped long enough to unsling her bag from her shoulder, dropping it and her rolled up yoga mat onto the floor beside Ashley’s desk. She hooked the first two fingers on both hands into air-quotes so sharp they probably could’ve punctured steel, “‘Sexiling?’”

Ashley didn’t think she would’ve been able to control her face if she’d _tried_. She gasped through her grimace, hand balled into an uncomfortable knot around the pendant of her necklace. “Oh, ew, like when they put the, what, sock on the doorknob or whatever?”

Sam grinned that same ghoulishly humorless grin, setting a hand down on the post of Ashley’s bed to lean her weight against it. “That would’ve been nice. A sock would’ve been nice.”

“Wha—oh my _God_. No way. Sam.”

“Mhm,” she hummed.

A heavy shudder ran its way up her spine, making her judder from side to side. “Ewewewew _ew_ , you _so_ did not walk in on—”

“Oh yeah.” Sam said it casually enough, but her distress came through loud and clear. “Of _course_ I did, Ash. Of course I did.”

“But you didn’t like… _see_ …”

“Everything? Oh, I saw everything. Wish I could _un_ see it.”

“ _Sam!_ ”

“Every. Thing. Worst part? Not the first time! Not even _close!_ So. If you don’t mind. I will be hanging out here for, uh…” She checked the time on her phone. “Forever? Does forever work for you? Forever’s sounding pretty good to me.”

“Holy _cow_ , stay as long as you want! Live here, for all I care, not like _my_ roommate’s ever here.”

Sam let her legs go boneless out from under her, hunkering down onto the tube of her mat on the floor. “Ashley Number Two’s still got better stuff to do, huh?”

“I _guess_ so,” she sighed, skirting around Sam to get to her bed. “But I’m not about to complain. At least I’ve never walked in on…eugh.” Her tongue lolled out in a dramatic gag, “That’s just _so_ uncool.”

There was a quiet sound as Sam let her head fall back against the post of the bed. “Could we talk about _literally_ anything else, please? _Anything_.”

“Right! Right, sorry! Blech.” Ashley shook herself out before flopping down onto her stomach, pulling her pillow under her chin. She looked down to Sam, immediately blanking on every conversational topic she’d ever known.

As though she could read her mind, “Please stop thinking about it.”

“I know, I know! I _can’t!_ I’m trying! It’s just so _bad!_ ” She buried her face in her pillow to hide her laughter. “Who _does_ that? It’s so _rude!_ ”

“Definitely never had to worry about it back in the day,” Sam said, not without a trace of her own laugh. She ran her hands over her face, raking her bangs back and twisting her hair up into a ponytail. “No threat of Hannah pulling that shit, believe you me…”

Even though Sam was smiling as she said it, Ashley felt her own giggles taper off. Aw crap. Right. She redoubled her efforts to find something else to talk about. “Um…” she sighed, “Have you already eaten? We could go to the dining hall if you wanted.”

“Eh, I had something before going to the gym. Why, are you hungry?”

“Me? Oh, no, I already ate. Just checking! Uh…if you don’t have anything you need to work on tonight, we could…watch a movie? I probably have _something_ worth watching…or I could see if Chris could pirate something for us.”

Sam seemed to consider it for a minute, dropping her hands onto her lap once she’d tied her hair up. “I don’t know if I have the brainpower to focus on something for that long.”

“ _Ooh_ , yeah, no, I didn’t even think about that. Me neither, ugh.”

“No chance of a _bracing_ game of Social Suicide, huh?”

Ashley hung her head over the edge of her bed, fixing Sam with a flat stare. “Really? Really, Sam? _Really?_ ”

She snickered and reached up, jokingly patting Ashley’s cheek. “Ah, I’m kiddin’! We’re too nice for that game, you and me. We’d just end up hugging and, I dunno, talking about…”

“Cute boys?”

Her snickering turned into a full-on _snort_ at that. “Yeah. _Right_. Cute boys. All we _ever_ talk about, right?”

“According to those two dunces, it sure is.”

“They know us so well."

“ _So_ well.”

Someone out in the hallway slammed a door. Outside the window, a shrill laugh came before a car alarm started up. For a time, the two of them just sat surrounded by the dim sounds of other lives being lived, Ashley lazily swinging her legs in the air, Sam staring up at what seemed to be a dead fly in the light fixture.

Voice low and tinged with what could only be described as caution, Sam finally asked, “Do you, uh… _want_ to talk about cute boys?”

“D…do _you_ want to talk about cute boys?”

Sam raised and lowered her shoulders in a jerky shrug. “Yeah, fuck it. Sure, why not? We haven’t flunked the Bechdel test lately, might as well mix it up a bit. Besides,” at that, she sighed, scooting herself and her mat to face Ashley head-on. “Guess I never really found a good opportunity to answer your question from the other night.”

“Yeah, oh gee Sam, I wonder why.” Hugging her pillow close again, she sized Sam up from her perch on the bed. “…so…”

“So…?”

“ _Josh?_ ” And okay, she hadn’t meant for it to sound…like that. But there was no taking it back now. “Like, I get it, but—okay, no, no, sorry, no, I don’t. I don’t get it.”

“Ash, oh my God.”

“I don’t!”

“He’s very…” Sam waved one of her hands in the air, trying to find the right words. “ _Charismatic_. I’ll say charismatic.”

Groaning, she rolled onto her back. “Well _duh._ Not exactly what I would call ‘emotionally available,’ though."

“Okay, so he’s got some _walls_ …"

“ _Walls?!_ Maybe the kind _bomb shelters_ have!”

Leaning forward, she hovered off her mat just barely enough to smack Ash’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, I thought this was going to be a _safe_ and _accepting_ environment to have this cute boy discussion. Was I wrong?”

She pulled away a full second too late, scrunching herself closer to the wall to avoid any future attacks. “It’s just so _weird_ to think about Josh as like…a ‘cute boy.’” Again she stuck her tongue out, pantomiming a disgusted shudder. “He’s more like…an irritating older sibling. Loud. Rude. _Unnecessarily_ full of himself. _Loud_ …”

“You’ve known him since you were kids, _obviously_ that’s how it’s gonna be for _you_. But we’re not talking about _you_ right now, we’re talking about _me_ , so I’m gonna need you to stop being so _judgy_.” Still, Sam laughed, occasionally covering her face with her hands. “Also? _Also?_ Just saying, but I feel like I remember you being, uh…a _little_ standoffish about other people’s romantic prospects before, so isn’t it kinda _possible_ that maybe—just _maybe_ —no one but Chris can live up to _your_ specifications?”

Ashley rolled her eyes, opening her mouth in a silent but indignant shout. “ _Hey!_ ” Laughing, she threw her hands into the air, “Standoffish? Who was I standoffish towards?”

“Um, I seem to recall you saying that Mike—”

Both of them froze, going quiet mid-word, mid-laugh. The mood of the room didn’t really change, per se, even though the memory left them with the feeling of having stepped into something wet and sticky while wearing socks.

Sam clucked her tongue before rubbing at her face again. “Well, hang on. All right, I’ll take that one back. Maybe you were onto something with _him_. But. My point remains.”

“Just explain to me what the appeal is.” Boy oh _boy_ , she was glad that they were able to touch on the topic and bounce back so quickly. “Because I’ve been _looking_ , Sam, and I have _no_ idea what you’re seeing that I haven’t.”

She stuck a finger high up into the air. “Tall.”

“Ta—Sam, you’re like five-foot-nothing. _Everyone_ is tall compared to you. _I_ am tall compared to you.”

Another finger in the air. “Funny.”

“Oh, _hardly!_ Movie references and bad voices are _not_ comedy!”

A third. “Handsome.”

“Ew.”

“Ash.”

“ _Ew!_ ”

“We can’t _all_ be into nerds with dad bods. Can I _please_ continue? I thought this was _my_ time.”

“Fine.”

She stuck up another finger, “Complex.”

“No. Nonono. No, he’s not. He’s really not. He’s as _un_ -complex as people _get_. He’s a four piece puzzle.”

“You are _so_ —”

“Josh is a square peg in a square hole. Easy peasy. I’ve done connect-the-dots more complicated than him!”

Rocking back on her mat, Sam groaned loudly. “Hey, I know you haven’t had a _ton_ of likeminded lady friends in your time—”

“Ouch?”

“—but I feel like it’s my duty to inform you that this isn’t how cute boy talk usually goes. Just, you know, for future reference. Usually the point is to hype the other person up, ask them gushy questions, that kinda junk. So far this has sorta been cute boy _smack_ -talk, and I gotta be honest with you, not really what I signed up for.”

“Okay, okay, okay. Fine. I will _try_.”

“ _Thank you_. Sheesh, here I was, thinking you guys were _friends_. You’re over here burning him at the stake.”

Now, she knew how she _wanted_ to respond. She knew what she _wanted_ to say. But when she went to actually say the words, they were dry in the back of her throat like old saltine crumbs. There was no _way_ Sam hadn’t noticed the strange pause she took, absolutely _no way_. “We _are_ friends,” Ashley insisted, doing her best to keep her voice light, free of the doubt she’d been nursing deep in her chest. “I just wouldn’t _kiss_ him. Ech.”

“Yeah, well,” Sam muttered, her own voice dipping until she was speaking under her breath. “Don’t knock it ‘til you try it, I guess.”

Silence.

Profound.

Fucking.

Silence.

The mattress squeaked in objection as Ashley sat bolt upright. That time, when she looked across the narrow space between them, her eyes fixed on Sam with an acuity that was, quite frankly, frightening. Or close to frightening. Frightening-adjacent. It was difficult for her to intimidate anyone even when she _really_ put her mind to it—she was, after all, _maybe_ a hundred pounds soaking wet, with all the constitution of a shivering lapdog. Still, Sam’s expression flickered enough that Ashley couldn’t help but wonder whether she felt even a faint jingle of apprehension blooming in her chest. “…what?”

Sam didn’t answer her immediately. Instead, she assumed another strained smile, meeting her gaze with an uncharacteristic flush.

As she watched her, Ashley straightened up from her lean, eyes narrowing only slightly. Had she been able to see her own face, she might’ve laughed; in that moment, she looked very much like someone attempting a tricky math problem without a calculator. She raised both of her hands with jerky movements, holding both of her index fingers up in the universal sign for ‘Hold up.’ She opened her mouth and shut it again. Blinked. Tried to speak once more. “Sam.”

“…yes?”

“Are you saying…what I think you’re saying?"

“Uh, I guess that depends on what you think I’m saying.”

Ashley was still staring at her as though she’d sprouted another head, eyes wide with dawning understanding. “I think you’re telling me you’ve _kissed_ Josh,” she said plainly, doing very little to mask the tone of her voice. And what _was_ it? Surprise? Distaste? Confusion? Hell if _she_ knew. “I think _that’s_ what you’re telling me, Sam.”

She tightened her lips against her teeth in a sheepish wince. “Well, uh…if we’re getting _technical_ here, then no. That is not what I’m telling you.” Sam watched Ashley begin another face journey. “Because if we’re getting _technical_ , then, I mean…” another shrug, “ _He_ kissed _me_.”

“Did you kiss him _back?!_ ” Ashley was next to her before she could so much as blink, her legs folded under her. “ _Sam!_ ” she exclaimed, tacking an extra syllable onto the end to show she was really, _really_ serious. ‘ _Sam-uh!’_

“It’s a long story, I—” Sam shook her head slightly. “Okay, no, it’s not long. But it’s boring. It just _happened_ , and—”

“Did you kiss him _back?_ ” she repeated as she fumbled to cross her legs, making a clumsy effort to mirror Sam’s posture.

Deep breath in, deep breath out, she rolled her head onto her shoulder and simply _looked_ at her. Didn’t say a word. Not a single one. And even so, she watched with something bordering on amusement as realization lit up Ashley’s face.

“You did. You _did_.”

“Ash—”

“If you kissed him _back_ , Sam, then it doesn’t _matter_ who started it! Oh my God. Oh my _God_. Oh my _God?_ You kissed _Josh_.” She just kept saying it, her face suggesting it was a sentence she’d never in her life expected to say. “I—okay, no, wait, hang on. Hang on, wait. When was _this?!_ ”

Sam reached up to cover her own face with her hands, scrubbing at her eyes tiredly. There was no use trying to hide it now. “Uh…well…your grad party.”

“My— _what?!_ That was like…that was _forever ago!_ Were you just never gonna say anything, or…?”

“I figured _he’d_ probably mention it, and—”

“Wait! _Wait!_ If this was at my grad party, then where the heck was _I?!_ ”

“In the pool!” And then, not entirely sure _why_ , she added “With Chris,” as her attempt at a cunning little deflection. Even though she capped it off with another half-embarrassed smile, it was obvious Ashley wasn’t biting. “It wasn’t a big deal or anything.”

“Not a big…” Ashley rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, taking a deep breath before raking her fingers through her hair, gathering it up only to let it fall back down around her face. “Not a big _deal_ , she says. All I did was kiss Josh, she says…I cannot _believe you_ , Sam! Months. _Months!_ It’s been _months!"_

She groaned again, but it quickly devolved into a tired laugh. The day had been too long, too uncomfortable, too _weird_ , and it was suddenly impossible to keep the giggles at bay. So she laughed, pressing her hands over her eyes to shield herself from at least _some_ of Ashley’s accusations. She was more than a little relieved to hear her join in on the laughter. “How about _this_ ,” Sam offered. “I will _definitely_ let you know the next time it happens.”

“The _next time?_ ” Ashley leaned forward insistently, “So there’s gonna _be_ a next time? Don’t you—” Freezing, she blinked, a sudden suspicion washing over her. She grabbed one of Sam’s hands, trying to pull it away from her face, “Wait. _Wait._ Are you—did—has there already _been a next time?!_ ”

Sam peeked out at her through a gap in her fingers. She wasn’t sure what to do with the rest of her face, so she settled for another tense, uncertain smile. “I mean…”

“That is so…so…” Ashley let herself fall back against the bedframe, eyes wide though staring at nothing in particular. “So… _gross_ , Sam.”

“ _Hey!_ ”

“Does that mean you guys are like, _dating_ now?” Her head swiveled back to Sam, her expression a near-comical mask of confusion. “Have you _been_ dating this whole time?! That is _extremely_ uncool to just—”

And _that_ was odd—Sam shot her the one-two combo of a headshake and hand wave, only adding to the weirdness of the situation. “That’s…more complicated. Uh…no. Not…right now. Not _yet_ , at least. Not while things are so…” Her voice trailed off, her eyes narrowed, and Ashley realized _she_ didn’t have the right adjective to complete that sentence either. “There’s a lot of… _stuff_ …that needs to get worked through first, I think. I want, uh…ugh. I want to be sure that it’s its own thing, and not just because of Hannah and Beth.” There was something quietly doubtful in the tone of her voice, making it seem all the more _real_ , somehow. If there’d been any question whether this was a bizarre story she’d spun up to pull Ashley’s leg, well there sure as hell wasn’t _now_. “Does that…make sense at all? Or do I sound like a crazy person?”

“No, i-it makes sense.” She bobbled her head up and down briskly, not wanting to prolong the heaviness the air had taken on. “Perfect sense.”

“Oh, okay, good.”

They both stared at their hands for a while after that. It was immediately obvious that this was not how either had expected the conversation to go. Then again…conversations _never_ really went the way they expected.

It was a risky move—one she had never taken herself despite seeing it carried out hundreds, nay, _thousands_ of times—but Ashley softly cleared her throat. “I gotta say, though…I kinda expected better from you, Sam. Best friend’s older brother, huh?”

Regardless of whether or not it was her imagination, she swore she heard some measure of relief in Sam’s groan. “Has it ever occurred to you that clichés are clichés for a _reason?_ People _love_ them!”

“Okay, sure. Keep telling yourself that if you need to.”

“You’re _so_ bad at this! You are _so_ bad at cute boy talk! I—no, you know what? You’ve lost your question-asking privileges. Now it’s _my_ turn.”

Record screech. Oh _absolutely_ not. “What? Nononono, that was _not_ part of the deal! This was—”

In one swift movement, Sam had finagled the pillow off of Ashley’s bed. She used it to get one good bop to the top of Ashley’s head before it was wrestled out of her grip and tossed aside. “I’ve had a very long, very traumatizing evening, Ash, and you’re sitting here making it worse, so excuse me if I feel like maybe I’m owed a little something in return.” Across from her, Ashley stuck her tongue out; Sam poked her own out in response. “What’s up with you and Chris?”

“Ugh.”

“No. No ‘ugh.’ I think we’re _way_ past ‘ugh’ at this point, don’t you?”

Ashley could literally feel herself going red under the scrutiny of Sam’s stare. In her mind’s eye, she watched it rise like the cartoonish line of a thermometer, shooting up from her neck to the top of her head. “Sam, I-I…you don’t…”

She raised her eyebrows but said nothing, simply setting her chin into her hands as she waited for the answer.

And really, none of that felt particularly _fair,_ because it wasn’t like she had _invited_ Sam over for this. If she had had some _warning_ , a day or two to prepare a succinct, professional speech about the whole ordeal, then maybe she could’ve made it work, but this? This was too sudden! She’d never even _considered_ rehearsing anything like this, she didn’t have the words ready, didn’t know what she wanted to say or _how_ she could go about saying it without sounding like an absolute loon. The Josh stuff was one thing, she was _ready_ to talk about the Josh thing, she was busting at the _seams_ to talk about the Josh thing, really…

The Chris thing was different! The Chris thing was stupid and embarrassing and…Ashley took a long breath in, pressing her lips into a hard slash. It was stupid and embarrassing, sure, but this was _Sam_ she was talking to. _Sam_. So maybe…maybe she could…manage. “I—okay. Look…everyone and their _grandma_ knows I like Chris, all right? Everyone. It’s…”

“ _Obvious?_ ”

So much for managing. It was one thing to say something yourself, quite another to have someone say it _to_ you. “You don’t have to say it like _that!_ But…yeah, pretty much. I’m not… _good_ at like… _hiding_ things. Or being subtle. Or controlling my facial expressions.”

“You’re really not.”

It was her turn to grab the pillow, whapping Sam in the shoulder with it. “You’re _so_ not helping!”

She held her hands up in a futile attempt at defending herself. The gesture neither protected her from the pillow nor hid how hard she was laughing. “Sorry, sorry!”

Ashley dropped the pillow into her lap, nervously reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ears, if only to give herself something to do. “The point is, everyone knows, okay? Everyone. So…” Her hands fell weakly to the pillow before she turned, trying to find something— _anything_ —to focus on so she wouldn’t have to keep looking at Sam as she talked. “ _Chris_ …has gotta know, too.”

Sam was quiet for a moment. “I’m…not _totally_ sure that’s true, Ash.”

“Oh please, he absolutely does. He’s not an _idiot_.”

Another long beat of silence filled the room. “I’m not totally sure _that’s_ true, either.”

“Sam!”

“I’m just—hey, I’m just _saying_ that um, he can be a _little_ oblivious sometimes, don’t you think?” Had Ashley been turned towards her, she would’ve seen Sam pinch her fingers in the air to illustrate. She _also_ might’ve noticed that instead of holding her fingers so they just barely touched, Sam kept them a good four inches apart. “Very good at fielding IT questions. Nooot so good at, say, grasping the finer points of human social interaction.”

Her eyes rolled up to the ceiling. Loath as she was to admit it, yeah, Sam had had a point—cute boy smack-talk was sort of a bummer. “Everyone jokes about it. And they have. Forever. I mean, just look at Josh and all the stupid nicknames he throws at us! It’s just…it’s obvious.” Aaand…there it was. The pout was beginning to form. She could _feel_ it taking shape, but was entirely powerless to stop it. There were reasons she didn’t talk about the Chris thing, and hot damn if this wasn’t numero uno on that well organized list. “So I don’t know what you want me to say besides that. It’s obvious, I don’t do a good job at hiding it, he definitely knows, and if he was actually interested then something would’ve happened by now. It hasn’t, so.” The shrug felt too jerky to _her_ , so she shuddered to think what Sam must’ve thought of it. “That’s it. That’s all, folks.”

As it turned out, Sam had nothing to say about the shrug. She sat watching her for a few seconds, worrying her upper lip between her teeth until the very last of her lip gloss had been chewed away. Sam scooted over to one edge of her rolled up mat, patting the other side to encourage Ashley to join her; it took a few pats to finally convince her, but once she had, she set her head lightly against Ashley’s shoulder. “I’m gonna say something as your friend, okay? With all the love and affection I can muster up.”

Every muscle in her body went reflexively stiff with anxiety. “Uh oh.”

“Chris is…sweet.” Sam spoke slowly, triggering each of Ashley’s internal warning bells. That was the sound of someone being _real_ careful with meting out their words in just the right way. “And one of the smartest people I know. However! He is also…and this is where I need to remind you of my love and affection…an absolute _moron_.”

“ _Sam!_ ”

“ _Ash_.”

“He’s not…” But try as she might, the words, uh, weren’t that easy to push out. “Okay, maybe he can be…” She narrowed her eyes, “… _dense_.”

“That’s a very kind way of putting it.” Sam patted her back lightly, doing little to stifle her laughter. “Now, I’m gonna ask you a question and I want a direct answer, okay? No wibble-wobbling."

The pout was in full effect. Direct questions were the worst kind of questions.

Sam lifted her head from Ashley’s shoulder, instead facing her on the mat. “Have you ever considered that _he’s_ waiting for _you_ to make the first move?”

Okay, that was just _stupid_ , why would _that_ even…well hang on a second. Entirely unaware of how her mouth was hanging open, Ashley knit her brow, the cogs in her head whirring away to the tune of an overheating laptop. “N…no.” The admission brought with it a whole host of other questions, _bigger_ questions, questions she would have to grapple with _later_ , when Sam _wasn’t_ staring at her. Then, as the shock began to wear off and she was able to process it, “No. _No_ , because…no, I…I couldn’t _do_ that! He knows I couldn’t…that’s not…I am _not_ the kind of person who makes the first move! I hardly _move_ as it is, I…”

“Sure you could!”

“I could _not!_ Oh my _gosh_ , Sam, you think I should… _what_ , just go over and—”

“Hey, here’s what I’m saying…” One arm draped around Ashley’s shoulders as she gestured grandly in the air with the other. “I have a birthday coming up, right? So really, this is a _perfect_ setup for you. Since _I_ kissed Josh at _your_ grad party, I think _you_ should kiss Chris at _my_ inevitable birthday party. Think of it.”

That time she _did_ groan, burying her face in her hands. “Shut _up!_ ”

“Honestly, I think it’s a _great_ plan.”

“It’s _not_ the same! You even said, _Josh_ kissed _you_ , you didn’t—”

“Yeah, but _you_ said it didn’t matter.”

“Because you kissed him _back!_ ”

“Oh, and what, you think _Chris_ wouldn’t kiss _you_ back?” Even with her hands over her face, _something_ must’ve shown through, because hardly a second later, Sam gave her a reassuring squeeze. “Ash, oh my God. Take my word on this one, okay? He’d kiss you back.”

“You don’t _know_ that! You couldn’t _possibly_ know that! I’d make an absolute fool out of myself! I’d never be able to look at my own face in the mirror again without thinking about that time I went and did something that dumb! You don’t…ugh. You don’t _get it_.”

She didn’t need to be able to see Sam’s face to know she was rolling her eyes. “I think I get a little more than you know.”

“No, you _don’t._ ” Ashley sighed and dropped her hands uselessly into her lap, feeling the tips of her ears burn like hellfire. “It’s so stupid, Sam. It’s all just…so stupid. _I’m_ stupid.”

“It’s not and _you’re_ not.”

“It _really_ is. It’s just…sappy and stupid and _dumb_. And I hate it. I _hate_ it! Because we’re _friends_ already! We’re really, _really_ good friends, we’re so _close_ , and it’s like, what, that’s not _good_ enough? I can’t just be happy with that? I have to be like, _nooo_ , on _top_ of all that, I want _more!_ Like…I want him to give me one of his hoodies to wear, and-and I want to have a little heart emoji next to his contact in my phone, and I want…I don’t know, I want…”

“Significant hand touches?”

Ashley turned towards her so quickly that Sam could’ve sworn the air made a _sound_. She stared at her, eyes wide and jaw slack with surprise. “Yeah! I—wait, how did you _know th_ —”

But Sam only nodded sagely and placed a hand on Ashley’s knee. She lowered her voice as she asked, “The finger thing?”

“ _The finger th—yes! The finger thing!_ ” A manic laugh bubbled out of her before she could cover her mouth to tamp it down. “Oh my God, Sam, oh my _God_. Get out of my head. That was…that was _creepy_. Jeez.” Then realization struck and she froze, grimacing slightly. “Wait…are we talking about the _same_ finger th—”

“I hope to _God_ we’re talking about the same finger thing, because there are only so many things I am willing to think about Chris doing with his fingers, thank you very much.” One, two, three firm pats to her knee and Sam pushed herself up from the mat, stretching her legs out with a quiet noise. “All I’m trying to say is…I think you can be braver than you give yourself credit for.”

“Pfft. Easy for _you_ to say.”

She poked the very top of Ashley’s head on her way past her, shaking the pins and needles out of her legs by walking up and down the room’s narrow strip of carpeting. “ _Consider_ it, all right?”

“Uh huh, sure,” she intoned flatly. Once Sam got up to pace, she grabbed her phone from off the top of her desk, checking to see whether she’d missed anything important. She hadn’t— _phew_. Some part of her had been _convinced_ she’d have a text from one of the guys waiting. ‘ _Are you talking about me?????_ ’ it would read, one (or God help her, _both_ ) of them having been let in on their little chat through some kind of telepathic bond she hadn’t been aware of. Explaining all that to Sam had been bad enough, she didn’t think she had the mental wherewithal to come up with some kind of excuse for the guys…or worse, an _admission_.

Eugh.

Already she knew she wasn’t going to be able to focus on _anything_ for the rest of the night. Or tomorrow’s morning classes, for that matter. Nope, _nope_ , Sam had gone and saddled her with a big ol’ glut of information that she was going to need to pick apart and process and _deal with_ —whatever that meant.

Ashley turned to say something to that effect, maybe to sarcastically thank her for guaranteeing she flubbed tomorrow’s algebra quiz, only to find herself puzzled once more. Sam had stopped pacing, it seemed, opting to stand horribly still in front of the room’s second desk, bent over just enough to be eye-level with the mass of photographs her roommate had tacked up. Though she could only see her profile, Ashley was struck with the strangeness of Sam’s expression as she focused in on one Polaroid in particular. “You…okay over there?”

Sam narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips before tapping the photo with her finger. “Is this your mysterious invisible roomie?”

“Uh…” Getting right up next to her, she crouched until she was able to see the brunette Sam was pointing at. “Yeah, that’s her! Ash-league _-hhh_. She’s okay, just sort of—” About halfway through the thought, she realized she had no idea how she wanted to finish the sentence. There were just so many noncommittal adjectives to choose from.

It turned out not to matter all that much. Before Ashley could figure out what she wanted to say, Sam spoke up again, her voice taking on the same fake cheer as before. “Hey! So here’s…a thing. Uh. Remember how I got sexiled? How it’s the whole reason I’m here?”

“I…do…” she said slowly, watching her with suspicious eyes.

“Mhm, mhm, mhm…remember how I said I saw just… _everything?_ ”

Without really knowing _why_ , she began to cringe. “Yeah?”

She began jabbing the photo with a renewed vigor, shaking her head. The weirdest sound escaped her as she did it, though Ashley couldn’t even begin to guess whether it had been meant as a laugh or a sigh or the beginning of a shout. “I think our roommates know each other.”

“Oh, weird. Small world, I gu—” The look on Sam’s face suddenly made too much sense to her. All the pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place, à la the last few pages of a _Sherlock Holmes_ mystery, but…no way. No _way_. “Wait. _Wait_. Are you…oh my God.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhhhhhhhhh, this feels NUTS for me to actually write, but today, August 28, is OFFICIALLY the 1-year anniversary of The (Almost)s!! It's so surreal for me to sit back and realize this monster is already a year old, I stg. 
> 
> When I posted the first chapter of this a year ago today (on my old account, whoops), I had no idea that TA was going to become as big a part of my life as it's become...and I DEFINITELY had no idea that it would introduce me to so many awesome, fun people in the process :)
> 
> We still have a way to go (HOPEFULLY NOT ANOTHER YEAR!!!), but I wanted to take a second to thank all of y'all out there for joining me on the journey so far!!! A super, SUPER special thank you to all of you who stuck with me through needing to switch accounts and start all over again - I can't tell you how much it means to me that there were those of you who actually found me again after all that chaos instead of just throwing your hands in the air and going "FUCK THIS!" Really, it means the world!!! <3 
> 
> Now, everyone go out there and eat something, idk, birthday-related. I know I will be ;P


	14. Where a birthday (brings everyone together)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Quick FYI, ya gurl has been on a bit of a medical journey the past couple months, and it's still, uh, going...so while I try and get a chapter out about once a month, I apologize in advance if that changes in the near future! Lots of traveling to/from specialists, what can you do.
> 
> As always, thanks for stickin' around, and I hope you enjoy!!! :P
> 
> Relevant tags for this chapter: Discussions of mental illness (specifically hallucinations/psychosis), discussions of guilt/blame/grief, teen drama™, complaining about writing, secondhand embarrassment by the boatloads.

**Thursday, September 25, 2014**  
**1:43pm**

The waiting room was never, ever empty. Someone else was _always_ lurking in one of the many chairs, typically staring down at their phones, feet, books, or out into space, desperately trying to keep from catching sight of their similarly broken brethren while waiting for their turn behind the heavy door in the corner…So when he’d walked in (admittedly a few minutes earlier than usual) only to find the place deserted, Josh had been overcome with a deep sense of unease.

It was the same eerie worry that seeped its way in when entering a school after-hours, or being the only shopper in a store—this was a place that _should’ve_ been bustling with other people, full of the ambient sounds of rustling clothes and fingertips on phone screens and turning pages and soft breathing and throats being cleared, and the absence of those things weighed on him like a block of concrete.

Josh had always been one of those rare people born to be in front of an audience. With others watching, he could do just about anything. He was the guy who presented group projects to the class, the friend who went up to the counter to point out a mistake in the order, the one who called out the shitty behavior of a passerby. There was no such thing as _bad_ attention, baby, only the sweet, sweet validation of being known. So when there _were_ no eyes or ears or even voices…he itched.

To take his mind off of it (if that was even fucking _possible_ ), he’d taken his usual seat in the middle row of chairs and pulled out his phone, rereading the scene he’d spent the morning trying to reformat. He still didn’t like the look of it—the whole thing _stank_ of English class short story—but it was what he had. At least for the time being.

> **The kitchen floor was sticky with something but they pretended not to notice. They sat in a lumpy circle, no one really looking at anyone else. No one wanted to see the agony in the others’ eyes, or worse, have their own pointed out.**
> 
> **“So that’s it, huh?” AM asked, his scowl deep enough to make his face ache. “They’re just…dead.”**
> 
> **There was a shallow cry from the direction of the dishwasher as MG buried her face in her hands. It was hard to determine whether she was grieving or terrified, but the others knew which was the safer bet. Up until the second they’d managed to give THE PSYCHO a taste of his own twisted medicine, she hadn’t been able to add much to the conversation besides “Not me! Not me! Don’t let him get me!” Sympathy had run dangerously low for her, in that last hour or so.**
> 
> **It was impossible not to notice how many of them were missing. The room reeked of blood and smoke, coating them all in a greasy sheen.**
> 
> **“We can’t stay here.” AM’s voice rasped, scratchier than it usually was, no doubt still choked with soot.**
> 
> **Though he’d appeared to be dozing, HD perked up, mouth curved down, forehead wrinkled with uncertainty. “We can’t LEAVE. They could still be…”**
> 
> **“They’re DEAD! They’re fucking DEAD! They’re not coming back! I want to go HOME! I want to get out of HERE! I never, ever, EVER want to even THINK about this fucking place again, and, and, and…” MG’s shrill screeching cracked just as her chest gave a huge heave, turning her into a quivering, sobbing pile of Jello. “Tuh-ake muh-ee huh-ooome!” she wailed.**
> 
> **Everyone looked away.**
> 
> **When a full minute passed without her stopping, AM groaned and began to get to his feet, grabbing the front of HD’s shirt. In one move, he tugged the other guy up with him. “Help me with her, wouldya?” he grunted.**
> 
> **“Help?”**
> 
> **“Let’s just get her somewhere where she can lie down.” He bent to take one of MG’s arms, shooting him a furious glare when he didn’t immediately jump into action. “NOW!” he growled.**
> 
> **Startled, HD took hold of MG’s other arm, aiding AM in yanking her to her feet. He staggered under her weight, looking helplessly over his shoulder towards the other two before stumbling out of the room.**
> 
> **The kitchen was quiet when they left. It was the kind of silence that made your ears ring until you thought you might totally lose your shit. But neither FG nor SC seemed to care.**
> 
> **They sat close enough to touch, both staring blankly into the space the others had just been sitting in. FG had never seemed so tired in her life. SC, on the other hand, didn’t seem much like anything at all…somewhere between their narrow escape and the fire in the supply shed, she’d checked out completely.**
> 
> **“Are you okay?” FG asked, knowing she wasn’t. As the saying went, the lights were on but nobody was home. She reached for SC’s shoulder. “Hey, are…”**
> 
> **“You changed your shirt.”**
> 
> **“I…what?” She looked down at herself, only understanding after a second of inspecting the bloody tank top. “Oh. That.” She felt stupid, but a stab of sadness hit her when she thought of the t-shirt that had been burned away. It was probably a stupid thing to care about, all considered. “Yeah…long story.”**
> 
> **SC continued to stare into space, her face pale but still puffy from crying. “We’re ALL gonna have long stories after tonight, aren’t we?”**
> 
> **She didn’t know what to say. She just hugged her knees to her chest and closed her eyes.**
> 
> **It was quiet for a long time, only the distant sound of MG’s banshee-like weeping reminding them they weren’t alone in the house.**
> 
> **SC had been so quiet for so long, in fact, FG actually thought she’d fallen asleep. When she spoke up again, FG quickly found herself WISHING she’d fallen asleep. “I was right there when it happened.”**
> 
> **She turned to her, hoping she didn’t mean what she thought she did. “What?”**
> 
> **“When he died,” SC droned on, voice flat and detached. “I was right there. I closed my eyes. Like a coward. Like a BABY. I closed my eyes like I ALWAYS do, but I…I could…” Then she was crying again, fat tears rolling down her cheeks and chin, splattering onto the floor. “I could SMELL it…I could HEAR it…and he just kept SCREAMING and SCREAMING and sc-scr-scr…” Her hair fell into her face as she fell into FG’s open arms, clinging to her like she was scared of drowning. “And I looked for you! I ran away and I tried looking EVERYWHERE for you, I promise I did, I PROMISE! I couldn’t find you anywhere, but…”**

“Josh?”

He slid his eyes up from the screen to see Hill leaning in the doorframe, waving him on. Oh Christ, he hadn’t even heard the door _open_.

“You young people and your smartphones…” Hill chuckled, leading him back into his office. “Always looking at _something_.” He pulled the door shut behind them, leisurely making his way to the desk. “Now, at _my_ age, I consider it a victory every time I’m able to successfully check for new emails without accidentally taking a picture or sending out a blank text message! But ah…” The chair gave a quiet groan of complaint as he lowered himself into it, “Such is the way of the world, I suppose. Always moving, always changing…how has _your_ world been moving and changing since last week, hmm?”

“Oh you know me, Alan, it’s a thrill a minute.” Instead of sitting, he made a lazy arc around the side of the desk, standing more or less adjacent to Hill and his chair; he took to examining the triptych with his arms folded across his chest, head cocked to the side just so. “I keep meaning to ask you, did _you_ paint this?”

It wouldn’t have been right to say that Hill appeared surprised by Josh’s wandering—he was _curious_ , perhaps, his fingers steepled beneath his chin, but not _surprised_. “ _Me?_ ” he asked, sounding almost aghast, “I’m flattered you think me capable of something as impressive as that! But no, no…a friend is an avid collector. A few years ago, oh maybe fifteen or so, while I was visiting home on holiday, they told me they simply couldn’t look at it anymore…” There was a distinct sense of _fondness_ about his face when his eyes moved to the painting. “And I knew I _had_ to have it. I’m sure you understand the compulsion, being a fellow appreciator of the monstrous and the horrific.”

“Yeah, I definitely get it.” For what felt like the first time, Josh forced himself to look _away_ from the girl in the center, taking in the rest of the scene as it unfolded around her. Amid the flames and hellish chasms ravaging the background, there were _other_ things like her. People, or creatures that had once _been_ people, their bodies skeletal but _wrong_ , stretched in odd places and contorted in others, their faces masks of agony, of rage, speaking of all the worst things hiding in the heart of men. They didn’t tear at themselves like the girl in the center did, though…their suffering (and the points at the ends of their fingers) seemed to be aimed more at one another than anything else.

It took actual _effort_ to tear his eyes away from the painted figures. “Would it be _super_ rude of me to ask where ‘home’ is, by the way?” Filtering himself had never really been a strong suit, but at least he hadn’t come right out and said ‘Hey Alan, level with me…what the _fuck_ is that accent of yours?’ “I mean, if you were visiting, then obviously you don’t consider _this_ ‘home.’”

“An astute observation.”

“Hey, you should know by now that I’m as astute as they come.”

Hill chucked, leaning back in his chair enough for it to squeak again. “Normally, people make some clumsy comment about not recognizing my accent. I suppose I should’ve expected better from you.”

Ouch. Narrow save on that one. Not for the first time since they’d met, Josh was feeling pretty damn good about his _own_ psychological acumen—impressing a psychiatrist had to count for _something_ , didn’t it?

“Sweden,” Hill said, watching Josh look back towards the painting. He paused as though waiting for something, the corners of his mouth beginning to tick upwards with each moment Josh remained silent. “And usually _that_ is when people make a comment about _The Muppets_. Or Ikea.”

Josh shot him a long-suffering look, hoping that if he seemed disgusted enough, Hill wouldn’t suspect that he had, in fact, been about three seconds away from a _mean_ Swedish Chef impression. He was just on a _roll_ today. “You guys have super long nights up there, right? Like almost twenty-four hours?”

That time, Hill _did_ seem genuinely impressed. “Hardly _that_ long! But they can be rather daunting in the winter, it’s true…” The quirking of his lips became an actual smile, secretive and intrigued all at once. “How would you know that?”

“Maybe I pay real close attention in school.” He didn’t need to look at him to know that Hill wasn’t about to buy _that_. Tearing himself away from the painting again, he finally made his way to the usual chair. “ _Let the Right One In_. It has another name, but uh, I don’t speak Swedish. Vampire movie, came out in 2008. It was a book, too…never read it, though.” He shrugged as he sat, letting his hands fall onto his lap. “Really good…really, _really_ good. Psychological, didn’t rely too strongly on jump-scares or cheap bits, had a _real_ solid ending…I got really into it in high school.”

Like some sort of magician, Hill had somehow managed to pull out his notepad and pen in the five seconds it had taken Josh to sit down. Already he was scribbling _something_ down on the paper, eyes flitting between Josh’s face and the loops of his cursive. “Worldly knowledge through horror movies. I don’t know why I didn’t assume as much.”

“It’s the curse of being heir apparent to a horror empire, my man. The context is _always_ blood-soaked.” He tried not to frown in the direction of the notepad—he really hated that thing.

“Well that’s ‘home’ for me. Where is ‘home’ for _you_ , Josh?”

“…really? Uh, here? Not like… _here_ here, I haven’t been living under your floorboards or anything, but like. You know what I mean.”

Part of him had expected Hill to dive deeper into that, to pick it apart, to say something about ‘home is where the heart is,’ or any of that cutesy dreck…but that wasn’t what happened. In a voice that was so calm it very nearly seemed uninterested, Hill asked, “Have you gone back to Blackwood since last week?”

“Blackwood isn’t my home.”

“Ah, but that’s not the question I asked.”

God _damn_ it. There wasn’t any point in lying to him the way he’d been lying to Linda, not when there was doctor-patient confidentiality to consider. “Yup.”

“How many times?” Like a dentist asking him about his fucking flossing habits.

“Just one.”

“And how long did you stay this time?”

Josh didn’t sigh or roll his eyes. He wanted to—oh, he _wanted_ _to_ —but he remained as stoic as he could. Until he got a solid read on Hill’s reaction, he didn’t want to risk showing his cards. “A few days. There’s a lot of space to poke through, y’know? The other day, I was down in the basement, right? And I found this door that led down into a _sub-basement_ , and you would not _believe_ the shit down there, Alan. You wouldn’t _believe!_ There’s a whole other _hotel_ down there, the one that _our_ lodge was built on top of, and—”

“Have you told your mother where you’ve been going?”

Uh oh. Oh, he did _not_ want to dwell on the stab of disappointment that pricked at his gut. How stupid could he _be_ , thinking Hill might be as excited about the old hotel as he was? Of course he didn’t give a shit about any of that, he just wanted to prod at his sick little brain. “I don’t really need to make excuses to her. I mean, I _do_ , but she doesn’t really _care_. It’s not like she’s around to listen to them, anyway.”

“I will take that as a ‘no.’ Have you told _anyone_ where you’ve been going? Your friends?”

He took to adjusting the strap of his watch. “I told _you_.”

Hill was quiet for a moment, raising his eyes from the desk. “That’s a long, dangerous trip for you to be making on your own, Josh, particularly if no one knows where you’re going. What if something should happen to you on the bus ride over? Or in the lodge itself? What if, heaven forbid, you slipped while on a path, or there was a problem with the cable car?”

Somewhere in the back of the office, the clock continued to tick its shallow ticks, marking seconds off as it always had. If there had ever been any comfort in the sound, there certainly wasn’t any just then. “Then I guess Mount Washington would gain another Washington,” he said steadily, “No harm, no foul.”

“No harm? You know I don’t like it when you speak so cavalierly about the value of your own life. You should tell someone when you’re going up to the mountain—someone _other than me_. What help would _I_ be to you if something happened?” The heat of his gaze bore into Josh’s forehead, “You should tell your friends, if you’re not going to tell your parents.”

“They wouldn’t get it. I’d have to explain _why_ I’m going…”

“And why _are_ you going?”

“Keep asking questions like that, and people are gonna start to think you’re my _therapist_ or something.” He sniffed airily, “I’m _going_ because it’s quiet. And it’s comfortable. And now I’ve got this _sick_ little writing workshop in one of the lower basements, and it’s perfect. _Literally_ perfect. It’s got these _huge_ boards where I can hang reference stuff, and a big, roomy desk where I can sit, and shelves for snacks and shit, and it’s just—”

“You know, it’s interesting you should bring that up.”

Josh blinked, taken aback. “Uh…my basement?”

Chuckling under his breath, Hill finished off whatever notes he’d been taking. When he glanced up at him, his eyebrows were arched high with what Josh hoped (but doubted) was amusement. “I was more referring to your writing. Don’t get me wrong—I’m sure we could sit and talk for hours about the allure of what you’ve found beneath the lodge—”

“I’d really kinda _prefer_ if we did,” he said offhandedly, already knowing the battle had been lost. “You ever see a dumbwaiter, Alan? Like the _real_ old kind? Super neat.”

“Be that as it may…I’m going to have us switch gears for just a moment.” Before he could argue any further, Hill held a finger up to shush him. “And if we have time, _then_ I would _love_ to hear about all the dumbwaiters and other remnants of the past you’ve managed to rescue from the dust.” He sat his elbows onto the desk and flared his fingers out, the gesture seeming almost like supplication. “Does that strike you as a fair deal?”

Josh eyed him warily as he tried to run the numbers in his head. The likelihood of Hill asking him something unpleasant was high. Real high. He’d probably ask why he wasn’t done yet, or why he thought he was struggling so much, or why…

“Josh?”  
  
“Oh, uh…” He shook himself out of his thoughts. “Suuure.” Hill turned to a fresh page in the notepad, the movement drawing Josh’s eyes immediately. Hoo boy. That sure felt like some kind of foreshadowing for how the conversation was going to go. Fuck it, whatever was meant to happen would happen, right? He’d gotten himself through way worse. He sucked his upper lip into his mouth, grinding it between his teeth, and waited for the onslaught to begin.

There was a soft _click-click-click_ from the other side of the desk; Hill had taken to tapping the butt of his ever-present fountain pen against the pad, eyes downcast and the wrinkles around his mouth deep with thought. “I wonder…do you remember why you began this project in the first place?”

He released his lip with an audible pop. “Uh…yeah. You said it might make me feel better.”

“Is that all?”

“…huh?”

 _Click-click-click_ went the pen. “I mean, is that the _whole_ reason? Is it simply a…homework assignment? A hurdle I’ve set in your path to recovery?”

Well _this_ wasn’t what he’d anticipated. There was no question in his mind that his confusion was coming across loud and clear—he _knew_ he was staring at Hill with the same sort of bafflement he usually reserved for physics exams. It really was a skill, how quickly Hill could make him doubt _everything_ he thought he’d been so certain of. An _awful_ skill, sure, but a skill nonetheless. “Is it not?”

When Hill shook his head, there was absolutely no reproach in his expression…which only served to confuse him further. “While I _did_ certainly say that some people find writing therapeutic—and I do stress the word ‘ _some_ ,’ there—that reasoning is purely incidental. So I’ll ask you _this_ instead…do you remember _when_ you and I first discussed you attempting this project?” He waited for him to say something, still tapping his pen. Slowly but surely, the rhythm seemed to fall in perfect sync with the ticking of the clock. “It _has_ been quite a while, I suppose,” he added upon sensing no answer was forthcoming.

“You know what they say about time flying.”

To his credit, Hill’s only response to the jab was a faint smile of acknowledgement. “We had just completed our exercise about the lovely young princess and the tragedy that befell her.”

A muscle in his jaw gave an unpleasant spasm. Josh pressed his fingertips hard against it. “Mmm.”

“The point of _that_ exercise, if you can’t recall—and again, it was so long ago now that I’d _hardly_ be surprised if you couldn’t—was to try and distance yourself from your trauma—” he ignored the noise Josh made at the word, “—to see whether you could more effectively sort through your feelings about what had happened with your sisters.”

His fingers crept from his jaw to the ridge of his brow, pushing against his sinuses until they ached. “Mmm.”

“So yes, _part_ of my suggestion to try writing a story was in the hopes it would help you to feel better and hasten you along on your journey through coming to terms with everything you’ve been going through. Of _course_ that’s a part of it. But at its core, Josh, the aim of this exercise should be for you to find a way to safely explore the emotions you aren’t allowing yourself to engage with.”

“I’m _engaging with_ my emotions. Trust me, if there’s _one_ thing I’m doing, it’s _engaging_.”

“With all due respect…I think we both know that’s bullshit.”

Josh could almost _hear_ the whistle of displaced air when he sprang back up to stare at Hill. He wasn’t entirely sure whether his shock came from the accusation or the simple sense of childish awe that came with hearing an authority figure swear.

At the sight of him, Hill chuckled, waving a hand in front of his own face as he tried to collect himself. “Sorry, sorry. I was under the impression we could be direct with one another… _unfiltered_ , as it were. Would you have preferred I say something more like, er…‘rubbish,’ perhaps?”

Still feeling struck somehow off-kilter, Josh watched him with a renewed sense of uncertainty. “‘Nonsense’ fits the accent better. Or ‘poppycock.’”

“I’m sure it would!” He kept smiling, taking it all perfectly in stride. “I’ll make a note to refrain from cursing, if you like.”

He never really knew what to do in moments like those…moments where he was reminded Hill was a _person_ , not merely another strange piece of the office’s décor. When the quittin’ bell rang, he went home, lived a life, ate dinner, read the news, complained about gas prices. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but maybe he was divorced. Maybe he was _dating_. Oh good Christ, did Alan _fuck?!_ Maybe he had kids, _grandkids_. It was a weird thing to grapple with, and he thought there was probably a word for it (if there _was_ , it was an Ashley-word, something he’d only learned for the SATs and then promptly forgot). “I don’t give a fuck if you swear.”

“Oh no?”

Josh shrugged again before catching himself in the act and instead folding his arms across his chest. He hated how often he shrugged when he was sitting in that chair. “Just…didn’t appreciate the suggestion that I’m avoiding shit, that’s all.”

“But you _are_.” It could’ve, and _should’ve_ , sounded so much more scathing than it did. Had _anyone_ else said it to him, anyone else at _all_ , it would’ve made his vision buzz with rage. Where did Hill get off saying it like _that?_ Like a calm statement of fact. Like a gentle reminder. How did he manage to sound so removed from the angry, judgmental voice that lived in the back of Josh’s head?

Hill took his reticence for acceptance, it seemed, as he smoothed the page of his notepad down and continued. “We _all_ avoid the things that hurt us the most. It’s how we’ve survived as a species for so long. There’s no shame in it, but you do need to accept it before you can move past it.” He glanced across the desk at him briefly, “With that in mind…as you’ve been writing, has anything risen to the surface for you, so to speak? Have you perhaps noticed any particularly strong emotions, or have you found yourself thinking about any specific events in your life? Has there been _anything_ that’s occurred to you during the course of it?”

Oh, it was pretty safe to say _something_ had been rising to the surface. But Josh wasn’t in any kind of rush to talk about _that_.

 _There are just some things you_ don’t _tell your shrink_ , he thought to himself, Hill’s earlier point sailing right over his head.

“Mostly it’s been making me realize I’m, uh, not a fucking writer.” He forced a sardonic grin, the sentiment only half-facetious. “If I had a nickel for every time I’ve rewritten what I have so far, I’d…well wait. Shit. Already live in a mansion…already drive a _sweet_ convertible…hmm…I’m sorta starting to realize that figure of speech works a hell of a lot better when your family _isn’t_ loaded.”

Though its tip remained threateningly close to the paper, Hill’s pen didn’t move in the slightest. “Ah, there it is. The humor meant to deflect your discomfort. I was wondering when it would make an appearance.”

It took actual physical effort to restrain himself from groaning aloud. If he went and did that, he’d be proving Hill right, and he couldn’t let _that_ happen. “I’m not uncomfortable. I’m just pissed that it’s taking _so long!_ I have all these ideas in my head, all this shit I want to happen, but it’s all…jumbled. It’s _messy_ , you get me? I grew up in this house where my pop could crank out flick after flick, so…I don’t know, not being able to sit down and push it out in one go is kinda pissing me off.” He threw his arms out to his sides, eyes wide and lips taut. ‘Happy now?!’ the look asked. ‘Are you happy _now?!_ ’

As if to say ‘Yes, actually, yes I am _quite_ pleased,’ Hill flourished his free hand and gave him a little nod. “Well…” he said slowly, speaking with the deliberately drawn-out syllables he _always_ used when approaching sore spots, “If it’s been such a frustrating venture, why haven’t you stopped? Surely you could do with one less source of frustration in your life! Certainly at this juncture!” 

Without fully meaning to, Josh sat up straighter, back rigid against the chair’s padding. “I thought you _wanted_ me to do it?”

Hill’s narrow shoulders pulled in slightly—it wasn’t really a _shrug_ , in that it lacked even the slightest trace of uncertainty—the gesture suggested he was thinking, or perhaps trying to decide what words to use. “I want you to do whatever it is _you_ believe will help. If that means carrying on with this story of yours, then by all means, continue! But if it’s making things _harder_ for you, Josh…if it’s only making you feel _worse_ , then don’t for one _moment_ believe that you’re required to keep it up for my sake!” After another moment of consideration, he set the pen down, lacing his fingers together. “This isn’t a classroom, you know.”

He tried not to scoff, but it was difficult not to let the sudden wave of petulance get the better of him. The suggestion of stopping, of _scrapping_ everything he’d been working on…it didn’t sit right. “Yeah, I noticed. Most classrooms aren’t full of creepy-ass paintings and phrenology heads…not any of the ones _I_ was ever in…”

 _Why_ did the thought of giving up upset him so much? It felt like indigestion; a sick, bubbling discomfort crawling up from the pit of his gut, wriggling its way up into his throat, sitting and burning below his tongue.

“Truly? Ah, then I suppose we had _very_ different schooling experiences, you and I,” Hill laughed. “What I mean is that you aren’t being graded here. And you’re certainly not being _punished_. If this has become some iteration of writing a sentence over and over on the chalkboard until you’ve learned your lesson, then you’re likely doing yourself more harm than good by insisting on pushing through.

“I’m here to offer you _tools_. Ways to work around the things that hurt too badly to touch until such a time as you feel you can bear them. Some of those tools may work, and others may not. Now, considering how much time the two of us have spent talking, do I perhaps have an idea of which might be most helpful to you? Absolutely! But do I think I will be correct every time? Not to repeat myself, but I think we can both agree that my saying yes to that would be bullshit of the _highest_ degree.”

Again he watched him from across the desk, and again he was struck by just how often Hill surprised him. This had _never_ been how his sessions went with Williams, or North, or even Purkiss, for that matter. It wasn’t how conversations about this shit went with his parents, either. None of it was ever quite what he expected. _Especially_ not after the hospitalization.

He must’ve been quiet for a beat too long, because Hill took in a deep breath to bring his attention back to himself. “ _Do_ you think it’s helping? This story of yours? Or is it adding to your worries?”

“It’s…” Ugh. _Ugh._ “…I think it’s helping. It’s taking a long time, yeah, and sometimes it makes me feel like I’m not good enough, or whatever…but it…it helps, I think.”

In a flash, the pen was in his hand again. Josh suspected that there was some stipulation in Hill’s will that would lead to him being buried with the thing grasped between his fingers. “In what way does it feel like it’s helping you?”

That time, he lost the battle against his inner brat, rolling his eyes and absently scratching at a patch of skin on the side of his neck. “Uh…it’s something to keep me focused? Keep my brain working while I’m out of school?” He dropped his hand onto his thigh, realizing all at once how tired he was. “Gives me something to do, like, a distraction, while _everyone else_ is at school, I guess.” The sound of the pen moving across the notepad was making his tongue itch. “And maybe, in a way, it’s…” Oh, and there he was, wading right into the stickier parts of it. He’d have to tread carefully on this one to keep from plunging through the ice and into the deadly waters below. “…getting me to think a little differently about people.”

Ding ding ding, ladies and gents! The magic phrase had been uttered.

The thing that clued him into _exactly_ how interested Hill was in the statement was how very, very little his posture changed. There was something about how purposefully he kept his eyes on his notes that _screamed_ psychological intrigue. “Oh?” he sounded disinterested. He was not.

“Yeah. New perspective or whatever.” Christ Almighty, the conniption Hill would have if he could see his new space in the sub-basements, the sketches tacked up over the character sheets, the lists of potential horrors he could inflict on any of them if there was a lull in the action. He couldn’t help but wonder whether Hill would agree with the dreadful doppelganger in his head. Would he find their graphite eyes odd? _Telling?_ What kind of notes would he take _then?_

“Let’s talk about people, then.”

“Hoookay. Sure. Why not.” He resumed his usual slouch, eyes drifting towards the window and the afternoon light shining through its panes.

Part of him, he realized, had been expecting Hill to pull out one of the manila folders or rifle through an older sheaf of notes. He didn’t, though; no, he just thoughtfully rested his chin against the hand not holding the pen, looking to Josh with an expression so calm, so cool, so collected, that he knew at once he’d been waiting a long time for this particular talk. A _real_ long time. “There were…” his gaze went distant as he counted in his head. “ _…seven_ people at the lodge with you and your sisters, correct? And yet, in all of our time together, I do believe I’ve only ever heard you talk about _three_ of those seven with any sort of regularity…I must admit, my curiosity regarding the others has been piqued! Why don’t we start th—”

“They’re not my friends.” He knew immediately that he’d said it too fast; that would be an answer in and of itself.

“No?” Hill’s confusion was obviously put-on, but there was nothing mocking about it. “They were at _your_ party, were they not? At _your_ invitation?”

He blew an exasperated raspberry as he sunk farther still into the chair. “They were the girls’ friends. _Supposed_ to be, anyway. Some fucking friends they turned out to be…” Almost defiantly, he turned his gaze back to Hill, raising his eyebrows. “Mike,” he said as he held up a finger, “Emily,” another finger, “Jess,” another, “Matt,” a fourth.

“Not your people, hmm?”

“That’s definitely one way to put it.”

“ _Oho_ …sounds to me as though there’s a story there. So Josh, _why_ is it that you don’t consider their merry band to be your friends? Again, despite inviting them to your parties and the like.”

“Well Alan, uh, that’s an interesting question, there. See, I feel like…hmm…I feel like it might have something to do with them _killing my sisters_ , but…”

“I’m quite sure it has something to do with that, too. However, ‘ _something_ ’ is never the _whole_ story, now, is it?” Pen in hand, he waved him on to continue. “Why not start with…well you mentioned Mike first, so let’s say Mike. What’s Mike’s story?”

“His _story_ , huh? Tale as old as time—Mr. Popular, Mr. High-and-Mighty. You know the kind. He’s the handsome jerk who’s not really good at anything besides talking girls out of their frilly little panties. The kind who lands Class Prez just because of his—” _Alpha Male_ , “—smug bravado, only for everyone to notice just a second too late that, whoops, five o’clock shadow isn’t really a fantastic predictor of leadership ability.”

Though he made a low noise of interest, Hill barely wrote down more than three words. “I’m familiar with the sort. He’s the one that your sister—”

“Yeah.” Way too fast. Again. He tried not to cringe at his own tells, knowing full well that the damage had already been done and Hill had seen everything he needed to. _Fuck_. “Hannah. Yeah.”

Another soft noise from across the desk. “And then there’s…Emily, you said?”

“The Queen B herself. Not much to say.”

“Oh no?”

“Nope.”

He waited for a moment, peering up from the notepad when Josh remained silent on the matter. “There must be _something_ about her that keeps you from considering her a friend. Maybe some personality quirk, or…?”

Josh sucked a breath through his teeth. “Sure. Fine. She’s tiring to be around. _Exhausting_ , even. She’s a self-entitled _bitch_ who thinks her 4.0, her daddy’s wallet, and her handsome asshole boyfriend make her better than other people. I’m sure she’d be _thrilled_ to know she’s important enough to be mentioned in someone else’s psych eval. _That_ kind of person.” His brow furrowed as he watched the pen glide from one side of the pad to the other, over and over and over again.

 _Nothing_ for Mike, but a _novel_ for Miss Mean Girl. That didn’t bode well.

“Did I say something interesting?”

Holding a finger up, Hill continued to write in his neat, looping script. It was only once he crossed his last t (or dotted his last i—Josh couldn’t tell) that he lifted his eyes from the paper. “You did indeed!”

“…oh yeah?”

“Would you care to know? Or shall I file it away for a later time?” There was a gleam in his eye that suggested he knew what a farce it really was, and yet he waited for his answer.

Josh gave a flourish with his hand. “By all means…”

“I can’t help but notice that arrogance seems to factor into your opinions of the two of them. Arrogance…money… _charisma_ …”

He wasn’t a _huge_ fan of the way Hill was looking at him just then. “Your point?”

Was that a _sigh?_ Or had he only imagined it? “Often—not _always_ , but _often_ —a lack of confidence in oneself will manifest as _over_ confidence, sometimes nearly to the point of appearing narcissistic.”

“Mhm. So you want me to feel bad for them? Should I find them less obnoxious because it’s _possible_ that _maybe_ they have low self-esteem?”

Okay, now _that_ was a sigh. “What I’m wondering is whether any of that sounds…familiar to you?”

He pressed his tongue against one of his eyeteeth until it stung. His eyes narrowed when the implication hit home, “You think that’s what _I’m_ like?”

“What _I_ think doesn’t matter one whit. Do _you_ think that’s what you’re like?” When he didn’t answer straight away, Hill leaned his arms atop the desk. “We have a nasty habit of disliking people who reflect the parts of ourselves we’re most ashamed of. No one likes looking into a mirror that _only_ shows their worst features.”

Josh opened his mouth to argue…

And then stopped.

He jawed at the air for a second or two, utterly at a loss for what to say or do or think or feel. For whatever reason, the image of the two sketches came back to him with a vengeance; even if he’d wanted to (and shit, he wasn’t sure he _did_ ), he didn’t think he could dispute what Hill was suggesting.

Maybe Hill recognized that, maybe he didn’t. Either way, he changed tack and returned to his notes. “What about Jess? It _was_ Jess, correct?” 

“I…really don’t know her at all. Or Matt.” Whether it actually sounded that way or not, he didn’t know, but his voice felt so fucking _small_. “Both were two grades below me, so I never really knew them, or hung out with them, or anything like that.”

“You must think _something_ of them.”

“I mean, okay, I guess. Jess is kinda cute, kinda stupid, _very_ loud. Matt’s your typical varsity jock: tall, dark, handsome. That’s about the size of it. They’re the American Dream, baby. Outside of that? No idea. They’re background characters. Stand-ins. I always just sort of thought of them as ‘Mike and Emily’s friends.’”

Hill nodded, still writing away as though he were trying to get his _own_ screenplay down. “They were _rather_ involved in the events leading to your sisters’ disappearances, the two of them? I seem to recall something about—”

“Jess wrote the note on _Emily’s_ behalf. Matt filmed it all. So I’d say they were pretty involved.”

“I should say so!”

Josh sat quietly as he watched the words take shape in front of him, upside-down and inscrutable, appearing like ritualistic sigils more than letters. He couldn’t begin to guess what it had been about the others that had interested Hill. They were assholes, sure, and they were idiots, definitely, but in terms of _his_ emotions? _His_ problems? What in the everlasting _fuck_ was there to pick apart about _them?_

A tiny click brought him back to the matter at hand. He felt his brow knit as he realized Hill had just done something he’d _never_ seen him do before—he’d _capped_ the pen. He hadn’t even known the pen _had_ a cap.

Well this was…new.

He lifted his eyes from the notepad, meeting Hill’s gaze directly. Squaring his shoulders, he tried to steel himself for whatever came next, expecting follow-up questions at the very least, another God-awful exercise at the worst. But as he watched, Hill simply set his pen down and folded his arms, steadily returning his stare. He didn’t say anything. And he didn’t _do_ anything.

“…what?” he asked when the silence became too much.

Hill shrugged.

Was he in the fucking _Twilight Zone?!_ First the pen cap and now _this?_

“What’s…why are you so quiet all of a sudden? Is that just...” A quick glimpse at his watch proved what he’d been suspecting: They were nowhere _near_ the hour-mark. “Is that _it?_ What’re you waiting for?”

With that same coolness, Hill shook his head. “I’m not waiting for anything!”

That settled it. If he _wasn’t_ in the _Twilight Zone_ , then he was having the _strangest_ hallucination to date. Corpses and gore were one thing—he _knew_ he was capable of imagining _that_ —but this? “You’re just…gonna sit there?” he asked, speaking carefully. “You’re not gonna ask me questions about anyone else, or…?”

“Do you _want_ me to ask you questions about anyone else?" 

“I—no.” It occurred to him a second too late. No, no he did _not_ want to get into the other three. Everything made sense then, snapping him with all the force of a bear trap. He’d been backed into a bit of a corner. “I just figured since you asked about those guys…”

“Well, since you brought it up…” He made no move to pick the pen back up or flip to a new page or anything like that, still staring straight ahead at Josh. “There _is_ something I’d like to ask you. I suspect it will be a… _difficult_ question for you, though. You may not have an answer for it just yet.” The corners of Hill’s eyes narrowed minutely as he regarded him across the expanse of the desk. “In all the time we’ve talked about your sisters—or talked _around_ your sisters, as the case may be—why is it that _today_ is the first day I’ve heard you talk about these four at any length?”

“I already _told_ you, I don’t _know_ them—”

“Yes, yes, you’ve said as much, but that doesn’t really answer my question, now does it?” Leaning forward another inch or so, Hill’s scrutiny only seemed to intensify. “Is _knowing_ them important? Maybe we’ll disagree on this, but I find it doubtful that you would need to _know_ them to be able to effectively sit and discuss the ways in which they’ve wronged you and your family.” He shrugged again, feigning nonchalance as he continued to scan Josh’s face. “Again, I’m not expecting you to have an answer for me right now! Truly, I’m not. What I want you to think about, though, is _why_ you can sit here and _freely_ acknowledge the terrible, cruel, things _they_ did to your sisters…and then direct so very _little_ of your anger in their direction. _Why_ is it that the ones who wrote the note, acted as bait, and recorded the entire sordid ordeal are somehow saddled with less guilt, in your mind, than—”

“ _Don’t_.”

He pulled back, but only slightly, gaze still searching him for…something. “Therapy isn’t always comfortable, Josh.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“Do you think the way you feel about your friends—Chris, Ash, Sam—do you think those feelings are reason enough to treat them like you have been? _Because_ they are your friends, your people, does that mean their actions or inactions somehow carry different weight?” Whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t an immediate answer; Hill flared his fingers plaintively as he continued, “You keep running off to your family’s lodge to write, and that’s fine. Sometimes we _all_ need to get away. But I’ve told you this before, and I’m going to tell you again, there is a _difference_ between solitude and isolation. They can both be _very_ tempting in their own right, even alluring, but you are _not_ going to heal from any of this if you keep pushing yourself away from everyone who cares about you. You simply will _not_.

“Isolation can and will convince you that it is safe. You don’t get hurt by other people when you’re alone. You don’t have to answer other people’s uncomfortable questions when you’re alone. So in that way, it might seem the best path, but I am here to assure you that isolation is a _liar_. Isolation leads to loneliness, and whether you’re ready to admit it or not, loneliness is your _worst_ enemy here, Josh.”

The skin of his wrist ached dully as he tightened his watch and tightened his watch and tightened his watch some more. “They’re talking about me behind my back,” he said softly, hating how childish, how _weak_ his voice sounded. “They don’t think I know. But I _do_. They think there’s something _wrong_ with me. That I’m fucked up. I’m not about to sit down and explain to them that I’m going up to the place where my sisters died so I can write a little story for my shrink to get in touch with my _emotions_.”

“Is that why you’ve been shutting yourself off from them? Because your feelings are hurt?”

He knew he was sneering, and he knew sneering was the _wrong_ thing to do, but he couldn’t stop himself. It came over him like an infectious rash, spreading across his face and twisting his features. “My _feelings_ aren’t _hurt_. Look, we _all_ have our ways of passive aggressively getting through disappointment, okay? Maybe I get distant with my friends, whatever. My mother sighs and shakes her head. _You_ use my full name when you’re lecturing me. We all have our fucking quirks.”

There was a flicker of something startlingly close to confusion in Hill’s eyes at that. “Do I?” he asked.

“You—” Whatever he’d wanted to say melted away on the back of his tongue. The more he thought back on it, the less certain he became. “It’s…fine.” Oh no. Oh God. _Had_ Hill ever used his full name? It was such a _parental_ sort of move, one that Bob and Linda would use, one that he, _himself,_ had been known to use, but _Hill_ …

 _Creatives and their memories,_ whispered the leering voice in the folds of his brain _, Creatives and the very, very damaged._

Hill was talking again, but Josh only half-heard him. He sounded distant, as though he were calling to him from the other end of a hallway instead of the other side of the desk. “Your friends are probably _concerned_ for you. Have you considered you’re jumping to the worst possible conclusion? Perhaps they’re trying to discuss how they can best help you or support you—if they had gone to you _directly_ with their concerns, would you have talked about it?”

“No,” he answered, his voice feeling not at all like his own.

“Here’s what I will suggest…why not tell them about your project? Would you at least consider that?”

“Sure,” he answered, his hand beginning to grow dusky from lack of blood flow.

“You said yourself that you’re finding it a difficult task…maybe it will be less daunting with help. Remember, that’s the _point_ of this, Josh, to help you work through the things you don’t want to admit, to help you look into the face of the parts of yourself you’d rather not. I’m sure they want to help you just as much as I do.”

“Yeah,” he answered, slowly coming to realize that there were much, much bigger issues at play than the group text. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t _fair_ that Hill could be so monstrous in his head and so _human_ in the flesh. It wasn’t _fair,_ because it made him wonder what _else_ his brain was tricking him into believing. “Maybe you’re right.”

***

**Tuesday, September 30, 2014**  
**11:43am**

“Are we cool?”

He barely glanced up from the syllabus, mouth moving (as it so often did) on autopilot. “What, like socially? Totally. Coolest of the cool. It’s 2014, dude, year of the nerd. Between my tech know-how and your frankly irresponsible collection of film equipment, we’re pretty much the Kardashians of the intellectual world.” Frowning, he underlined the due date of his God-awful midterm project. And then he circled it a few times. Just for, you know…good measure. “I’m Khloe, by the way. I know you probably wanna be Kim.”

“You know me so well, Cochise.”

Humming a distracted sort of sound, Chris furiously flipped through his calendar app to try and figure out how in the great blue _fuck_ he was going to get that project done. It was nowhere _near_ enough time to finish _writing_ that much code, let alone even _consider_ debugging it, and he already knew the other assholes in his group weren’t going to be pulling their weight, so _how_ —

“…?”

“Huhwha?” He turned to find Josh watching him, _clearly_ expecting some kind of answer. Oh shit. Uh. Whoops. “…yes?”

“You totally weren’t listening to a _word_ of that, huh?”

Chris snorted, waving his hand dismissively. “I was listening!” Josh’s expression remained unmoved—except, of course, for his eyebrows. Those had shot up in a cartoonishly doubtful way. “I mean, I _was_ listening, but if you _wanted_ to repeat yourself, I wouldn’t _mind_ …I know you like hearing your own voice, sooo…”

Josh snickered and shook his head, going back to aimlessly scrolling through his phone. There was something subtly off about seeing him sitting there on the bed, sprawled out as though he belonged in the room. He always managed to do that somehow…seem as though he belonged. “I _said_ ,” he began again, “I meant are we _cool?_ You and me.”

Just like that, the veneer cracked. Not a lot. Not enough to completely ruin the illusion. But it cracked all right, and Chris remembered with a jolt that Josh was _not_ his roommate, Josh did _not_ live on campus, and Josh did _not_ belong in the dorm. At all. He was a guest, and a tentative one, to boot.

He glanced to him from the corner of his eye, not wanting to give up the relative safety of the syllabus in front of him. There was a definite sense of relief in the fact Josh was doing the same, looking at his phone instead of meeting his gaze; maybe the ground wasn’t _even_ , but it felt closer than it had been in a long time. “Um, well, did you apologize to Ash? For the dad thing?” From his periphery, he saw Josh look up, so he looked _away_ , pretending to be marking important dates on his calendar.

Other than the usual sounds of people moving in the halls, the dorm was quiet. He didn’t need to be staring at him to know the look on Josh’s face: the flat line of his mouth, the single crease in his forehead. It was a look that usually meant he was trying to decide whether he was mad…or in deep shit.

“I was, uh…I was really just talking about you and me, man.”

“I know that,” Chris said, distantly wondering who the _fuck_ he suddenly thought he was, dragging this shit out instead of letting it be swept under the rug. It had been a month—a whole _month_ —since the fiasco in Ash’s dorm, meaning it had been a month since _he’d_ gone to apologize. A _month_. And still there were moments where he caught himself thinking about the pained look on her face as he tried to stumble his way through explaining away Josh’s behavior. ‘ _Does_ he _do that for_ you?’ she’d asked him, ‘ _Does he do that for you?_ ’

The answer had been obvious from the jump. He hadn’t _given her_ said answer, but it had been there. That was who he was, Chris Hartley—the guy who always knew the correct response but never wanted to raise his hand. When he was called on, when all eyes were on him, yeah, he could get it out…he just wasn’t about to put _himself_ on the spot. Not when it would open him up to humiliation, or even worse, outright _rejection_. No way. Not his deal.

“But…” And oh _God_ , why was he still going?! Why the _hell_ was he _still going?!_ “My answer sorta seriously depends on yours.”

More silence.

From where he was sitting, he couldn’t see what Josh was doing. He _could,_ however, hear him let out a long rush of breath from his nose, could hear the sound of skin being scratched at. “Y’know…We can have conversations that don’t revolve around Ash. You don’t have to bring her into _everything_. You _definitely_ don’t need to bring her into _this_ —”

“I kinda _do_.” Holy shit. Was he _possessed?!_ Something about the heaviness of the air made Chris feel like he had to say something else to follow-up with, though try as he might, he couldn’t figure out _what._

But that was one of the things about their relationship…Josh _never_ found himself at a loss for words. In fact, he was almost _guaran-goddamn-teed_ to have something queued up and ready to go in the event Chris didn’t know what to say. It was the kind of thing that came in handy when you were cracking off jokes or trying to improv a stupid bit—it was considerably less fun in situations like these.

“You’re acting like I went and punched her in the face or some shit.”

Before he even _realized_ he had a response, Chris coolly shot back, “You might as well have.” He took a deep breath before swiveling his chair to look at him. “You _get_ that, right?”

“I get it.” His tone was detached, his upper lip catching between his teeth whenever he wasn’t speaking. “This might surprise you, Cochise, but I don’t say shit just for the hell of it.”

His brow furrowed, the dissonance of Josh’s voice and words rankling him. “What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

For a while, Josh didn’t answer. He kept scrolling through his phone, teeth scraping at his lip, expression unmoving. It was just…strange. It was _strange._ Josh didn’t look mad or sad, or hell, much of _anything at all_ , leaving Chris to wonder exactly what he was walking into. It occurred to him then how _insistent_ Josh had been about coming to visit, knowing full well it would probably mean awkward introductions between him and his new roomie or tagging along to a sociology lecture.

He’d _insisted_. And now there was… _this_.

Whatever _this_ was.

Chest rising and falling with a breath, Josh set his phone on the mattress, keeping his eyes low all the while. “I haven’t been a great friend since what happened to the girls. I haven’t been a great _person_ since what happened. I know that.” It was so different from his usual tone, soft and steady and all but devoid of inflection—Chris had no idea what to do with _that_ , so he clammed up. He just let Josh talk. “I was fucking up before then, yeah, but I’ve been fucking up _worse_ since. I don’t _want_ to. I’m trying _not_ to. Clearly not hard _enough_ , but…” He shrugged and rolled his eyes upwards towards the light fixture and the dark shadows of the bugs that had sizzled to a crisp inside of it. “I thought dropping out would make shit easier. Aaand it didn’t. Instead, it made shit _worse_ , I think, cuz now sometimes it feels like I’m watching you guys all live your lives from the outside. And I hate it. And then I get pissed, because pissed is easier than sad. And then I freak out. And then people get pissed at me for freaking out. And then I get defensive and even _more_ pissed. Rinse and fucking repeat.” Josh agitatedly tousled his hair, lips pressing tight to his teeth in a bitter wince. 

“I apologized to Ash,” he continued, voice that same flat drone. “Maybe she just didn’t mention it to you. But I _did_. I apologized to Sam, too, and now I’m trying to apologize to _you_ , because I know I’m not being… _fair_ to you guys sometimes, you most of all, and like…that’s not how bros act.” He swallowed hard enough that Chris could see his adam’s apple jump with the effort. “I shouldn’t’ve brought up the shit with her dad, okay? I know that, Cochise. It was fucked up. It was wrong. Can’t say I’m psyched that you’re always so quick to take her side when shit goes down—”

“I don’t _always_ take her side.” Apparently he hadn’t said it loud enough, because Josh just kept talking, but Chris figured he’d already pressed his luck enough for the day, so he didn’t repeat it.

“—but hey, I get it. Who am I to interfere with you getting your grind on, huh?”

He bristled again, pointedly avoiding looking his way. That was _another_ thing about their relationship: Always two steps forward and one step _back_.

It seemed for a second like Josh was going to continue…and then he didn’t. Instead he huffed out a tired breath, cheeks puffing out, and reached up to rub at his forehead. “Yeah, and that’s…not helping. Fuck.” He scrubbed his face with his palm before flinging his hand out to his side. “I’m sorry. That’s what I’m getting at. I haven’t been handling shit the way I need to, and I _definitely_ haven’t been acting like a goddamn person. Sometimes I get so sucked into my own head it’s…hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.” Something in his expression changed, but for the life of him, Chris couldn’t figure out what it was. “I’m scrambling what’s _actually_ going on and what’s just my inner conspiracy theorist connecting dots. But I’m sorry, and I’m working on it, and I’m gonna be better.”

Well this certainly wasn’t how he’d imagined their visit was going to go down, that much was for damn sure.

When he was able to pick his jaw up off the ground, Chris just nodded. It was as earnest a conversation as the two of them had had in…actually, he wasn’t sure he wanted to think about how long it had been. It had been a _while_ , leave it at that, and while he knew the likelihood of it blowing up in his face was sky-high, he couldn’t _not_ ask the question scratching at the back of his throat. “Are you…” he spoke slowly, giving himself ample time to backpedal out and away, if needed. “…doing okay? Like…?” He braced for impact when Josh stood from the bed.

Normally, the question (vague as it was) would’ve been answered with some sort of fury—a slammed door, a sharp warning, an irate glare—but Josh only stretched a bit, his back giving a disgusting series of pops. “My shrink sure seems to think so. I’ve been taking that as a good sign.” 

It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain his air of cool detachment. What was he doing with his face? It didn’t _feel_ like a natural thing, whatever it was. And sure, okay, Josh wasn’t looking _at_ him just then, but he knew that could change at any second, so it would probably behoove him to _not_ be staring dumbly on the off chance he moved his head. What did normal people do with their faces when talking about shit like this? Did they smile? He tried, and it felt somehow even _worse_. Neutral was probably the way to go. _Neutral_. How did one make their face look _neutral_ , though? “Yeah, definitely a good sign, I’d think.”

“Here’s hoping.”

“You, uh…” Shit, there he was again, pressing his luck. “…like this one better than the last?”

Josh shrugged noncommittally, giving his spine one last twist before setting an arm against Chris’s desk. “ _Everyone’s_ better than the last one, trust me on that. But Alan’s cool. Kinda uppity, kinda creepy, old as fuck. Prime shrink material.”

“Sounds like it.”

His fingers drummed against the wood of the desk, tapping out a beat Chris couldn’t recognize. “So…” He dragged the word out until it had somewhere around six or seven syllables, “I return to my earlier question. Are we cool?”

It was a pointless question. A _stupid_ question, really. Deep down, he suspected Josh knew as much. They’d been through choppy waters before. They’d survived all of _those_ times, so why should this be any different? At the end of the day, Chris couldn’t hold a grudge. It wasn’t in his blood—he needed peace, calm, for everyone to hold hands and get along like they did in Coke commercials. So he offered him his fist, knocking their knuckles together. “Cool as the other side of the pillow.”

Josh’s relief was positively _palpable_ as he returned the fistbump, grinning so widely and earnestly that, if only for an instant, he looked exactly like the rascally third grader he’d sat next to all those years ago. “Oh thank _Christ._ Good, glad to hear it, man. Cuz now? Now we can get down to business.”

“Business, huh?” Chris leaned against the back of his seat. “I’m listening.”

Without asking, he reached around him to the syllabus, grabbing it and flipping through until he found a page that was blank on one side. “Ooh yeah, we got a bit of a journey ahead of us, Cochise.” Ignoring his protests, Josh tore the page off from the rest, laying it flat on the desk. He searched around for something to write with, eventually settling for wiggling his fingers in Chris’s face until he _gave_ him his pen. “You and me got some planning to do.”

“Planning? Wha—aw shit, Sam’s birthday! Right, right…fuck, I haven’t even _thought_ about a gift.”

He’d already started to sketch something out, but stopped, frowning. “Oh. Well…I mean…” He lifted his shoulders in what anyone else would’ve taken to be a shrug. Not Chris, though. Oh no, he recognized it immediately for what it _truly_ was—an admission of mischief. “That, too. We’ll get that one out of the way first…but nah, I meant _after_ Sammy’s big day.”

Chris raised an eyebrow, cocking his head to the side to get a better view of what was being drawn. He looked between the figure on the paper and Josh, beginning to suspect what this was all about. “ _After_ , huh?” Under normal circumstances, he probably would’ve pretended he wasn’t impressed by Josh’s artistic ability, but as the figure grew more and more familiar with each stroke of the pen, he didn’t even _try_ to mask his delight. 

“Oh yeah. I’ve got some…eh, let’s just say ‘ _big plans_.’”

“Ominous.” Suddenly, he realized he was grinning, too. “I’m totally down." 

Josh scoffed and shot him an incredulous look. “Uh, you better be! This is absolutely gonna be a two-man job, my good broseph. So. Here’s what I was thinking…”

*******

**Saturday, October 11, 2014**  
**7:54pm**

“One more! One more! One more!”

“ _One more?!_ ” Sam looked up from what she’d been trying to do (shoving about twenty square feet of crumpled-up wrapping paper into a flimsy gift bag), eyes wide. “What do you _mean_ , ‘one more?’ Why did you guys—”

“Shhh…”

“I—”

“No, no, shh, shhhhh…”

She considered trying to wriggle free of Josh’s grasp as he slid across the bench to snake an arm around her shoulders and pull her close. Considered, decided against it, and then promptly regretted that decision when he covered her mouth with his hand.

“Shh…shh, shh…the time for questions has passed.”

Rolling her eyes, she looked across the table to Chris and Ashley, hoping her exasperation was evident even with her face half-covered. They both laughed, so it seemed like a fair bet. 

“It’s just…a thing,” Ashley said, only adding to the intrigue of it all. “It’s not like… _big_ or anything.”

Chris held up a finger with a haughty sort of expression, fixing his gaze on Sam. “Aha, but! Continuing in tonight’s pastiche, there’s another birthday tradition you gotta follow. You can _have_ your present…when you guess what it is.” He rubbed his hands together like a Saturday morning cartoon villain and cackled manically into the air…

At least until Ashley muttered, “That’s not what pastiche means,” into her drink.

Evil laughter dying on his lips, he turned to her, staring uncomprehendingly. “What?”

“That’s not what a pastiche is. I—you couldn’t have used it more incorrectly than you just did. Literally. You couldn’t have.”

“Wait…really?! I’m…I’m pretty sure it’s right.”

“Well it’s _not_.”

“Okay then, Miss I-Know-Words-and-Stuff, what _should_ I have said?”

“Honestly? I’m not even clear on what you were going f—”

“Hey, uh, Willow? Xander?” A harsh clicking sound brought them both to attention. For good measure, Josh snapped his fingers again, waiting until they looked at him to go on. “I’m _loving_ the vocab lesson over here, really, I am, but do you think _maybe_ we could—” All at once he froze, face contorting into a mask of disbelief. “Did you just fucking _lick_ me?” he asked. Sam’s eyes were defiant over his hand. “Joke’s on _you_ , Giddings—I’m an eldest child. You think I can’t handle a little spit? You are _sorely_ mistaken." 

Letting her chin rest on her hand, Ashley tittered a quiet laugh. “Bite him.”

Though he’d momentarily bent over the side of the bench (ostensibly to grab something hidden underneath the table), Chris spoke loudly enough to be heard over the chaos around them. “Man, don’t egg her on! What if she develops a taste for human flesh?” With a grunt and an unnecessary wheeze, he reappeared, setting a wrapped package onto the table. “Oh shit, now _there’s_ a joke waiting to happen! Uh…uh…oh! Okay! What does a vegan zombie eat?” He paused with his hands spread out like an old-timey carnival barker trying to drum up interest. “… _graaaaains!_ ”

The groaning that ensued was loud enough that a few people at the next table over turned around to stare.

Sam wrenched Josh’s (now damp) hand away from her mouth. “I have to _guess_ what it is? Seriously? You guys have too many weird rules.” 

“Oh we’re _deathly_ serious.” Steepling his fingers under his chin, Chris shot her a look that was _probably_ meant to be threatening. It wasn’t. It never really _was_. “You’ll guess… _or else_." 

“Or else _what_ , you take it back?”

“No,” he drawled, “We beat you over the head with it until you lose consciousness. _Then_ we take it back.”

“It’s true. Last year Chris got concussed.” Ashley said it so seriously, so _grimly_ , that Sam couldn’t help but laugh aloud.

Nodding, he pushed the gift over to her. “Yup! But as you can see, my brain still good works!”

“I dunno,” Sam said with a sigh, inspecting the gift suspiciously, “You sure didn’t know what pastiche meant just then, so maybe you _did_ suffer some kind of serious head trauma.”

He leaned across the table to cover her hand with his. “Sam, I’m…I’m flattered that you think I _ever_ knew what that word really means. Truly. I am. Thank you for always believing in me." 

“Hey, hey, hey! No touching!” Josh nudged Sam’s hand off of the present, having to forcibly shove Chris out of the way to get to her. “That is absolutely cheating. Now c’mon, three guesses.”

“And then you bludgeon me with it.”

“I mean, if you’re _wrong_ ,” Chris chuckled. “So just like…don’t be wrong.”

“Yeah, but here’s the thing. _You_ get to pick the bludgeon _er_.” Shielding his mouth with his hand, Josh bent down to her level, “You’d _think_ the safe bet would be Ash, but it’s not. Girl’s got more pent-up aggression than she knows what to do with. She’s tiny, but she’s _feisty_. Nah, if you want minimal physical harm, you gotta go Cochise.”

“Hey!”

“Don’t let the dad bod fool you. Boy’s got noodle arms dangling from those broad, masculine shoulders.”

“Dude! I’m literally _right here!_ ”

Sam took a deep, dramatic breath before pensively tapping at her chin. She wasn’t sure what about it was supposed to help her think, but hell, it always seemed to work for people on tv. Her lips pursed, her eyes narrowed, the chin tapping intensified, and she tried her best to size up the package. “Is it…a wall decoration? One of those ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ monstrosities?”

“ _EEEEH!_ ” It didn’t _quite_ sound like a game show buzzer, but it was definitely as _loud_ as one. Josh offered the people at the next table a friendly finger-wave when they turned back to scowl at him.

“Aw shoot, strike one. Um, okay…then, is it…” She tilted her head to the side in an effort to better gauge the dimensions of it. “Is it a picture frame? Or a picture _in_ a frame?" 

“Hey Sammy? Quick question— _how_ exactly is that different from a wall decoration?”

“You can put a picture frame on other things, Josh! Like shelves, or desks, or side tables, or—”

“Yeah, good call, Ash! Y’know what? Just keep listing flat surfaces you can put shit on. Wait, lemme get my phone out so I can take notes…”

Sam pressed her hands helplessly to her cheeks. “Oh no, that means I’m wrong again!”

“One more,” Chris warned menacingly. Or as menacingly as he was able to be. “One more and then you know what happens…” He dragged his finger across the front of his throat, pantomiming his head falling onto his shoulder.

“Uh huh, and trust me, I’m _trembling_.” She clucked her tongue thoughtfully before standing from the seat to get a birds-eye view of the thing. “Crap. Well…here we go. This one’s for all the beans.”

“… _all the beans?_ Where do you people learn this shit? All the beans…”

“Is it a book?” Her eyes flit to each of them in turn. As she watched, the other three exchanged a rapid series of looks among themselves; in particular, Ashley and Josh appeared to be having an animated telepathic conversation. “Oh? _Oh?_ ” 

Josh shook his head. “No way. Nuh-uh.”

“Oh _yes way!_ ” Ashley argued, cocking her head to the side, expression incredulous. “Between that and her second guess? That’s like…no one could get closer! It’s not possible!”

“Can someone please just tell me whether I get to smack Sam upside the head?” Chris asked. “I need to know if I should start doing my stretches to get all warmed up…”

“You got it.” Turning to Sam, Ashley quickly grabbed the present off of the table and away from Josh, handing it over to her before he could interfere. “And for the record, no one would’ve hit you.”

“Oh, I _absolutely_ would’ve.”

“Shush!”

Sitting back down, Sam slid her nails under the taped flaps of paper, neatly pulling the seam open. Now that she was able to hold it in her hands, the weight of the package was surprising—given its size, she’d expected it to be a _lot_ lighter than it actually was. It felt… _dense_. Hmm.

The thing was, each of them had already given her a gift, which meant whatever she was holding had probably come from all three of them. If she opened it up to find something like a single marble flooring tile or a box full of ball bearings, she was going to lose her _shit_. Quite frankly, she wouldn’t put it past them to pull that sort of fuckery.

So there was a fair amount of surprise when she pulled the paper off completely and it was…

Huh.

“It _is_ a book,” she said, obviously impressed with herself. “Well wouldya lookit that!” She held it up and turned it over in her hands. There was no writing on the front…or the back…or the spine. Not _typically_ how books worked. “A very _mysterious_ book.”

“Oh man, if only there was some way to figure out what it was. That sure would be neat! But God, what’re you supposed to do, _open_ it? Flip through it?! Pfft. Lunacy.” Chris hunched himself over the table, resting his weight on his elbows. Ashley quickly followed suit, the both of them beaming expectantly. **  
**

“If only!” She pretended to be vexed by the blank covers until Josh made to swipe for it. As soon as she sensed his movement, Sam angled herself away from him, clutching the book tightly to her chest. “Hey! I don’t think so! I guessed fair and square. I can sit here staring at it for as long as I want.” With a shit-eating grin of her own, she set the book down onto the table and carefully opened the front cover. The first page was (maddeningly enough) _also_ blank. “If this is just a really thin, empty journal, I swear to God…”

But then she turned the next page.

In that instant, looking down at the book’s contents, she wondered how she hadn’t _immediately_ recognized it for what it was. The one Ashley had shown her had been the same color, the same size, the same weight, the same _everything_ , and it wasn’t as though she hadn’t been paying attention—she’d _scoured_ the Washingtons’ bookshelves for another, after all.

Sam stared down at the first page of the scrapbook with wonder bordering on reverence. She turned the pages one by one, stunned by the spread of photos on each; some old, some new, some she remembered _very_ vividly, others she couldn’t begin to place. There was the blurry selfie the four of them had taken at the end of Ash’s grad party, an _unbelievably_ unflattering Snapchat photo where Chris and Ash were hamming it up in front while she wasn’t looking _anywhere_ near the camera, a candid shot of her rolling her eyes while Josh was clearly in the middle of some dramatic story…but while the scrapbook in the Washingtons’ house had been chronological, hers, it seemed, was not.

Because there was a picture from prom. Mike and Emily and Hannah huddled close around her as she pointed at the camera, trying to get everyone to face the right way.

Then a snapshot from some night she couldn’t remember at all. She was front and center, grinning a secret little grin as the twins did _something_ in the background, Beth’s arms high in the air.

There was a picture from the twins’ sixteenth birthday. She and Emily sat to either side of Beth and Hannah, their cups of frozen yogurt decorated with novelty birthday candles.

And then a photo from a sleepover freshman year. It was badly out of focus, her and Hannah both flat on a beanbag, faces scrunched up with laughter.

Something must’ve shown on her face, because Ashley cooed _something_ in her direction, but it was all lost on her. She just kept flipping through the pages, unaware of anyone else at the table until she reached the end, a page decorated with huge, glittery gold letters (HAPPY BIRTHDAY SAM!!!) and nothing else, the space open and waiting for new photos to be added in. It was then and _only_ then that she realized Ashley had gotten up and scooted herself onto her side of the bench, and the warmth of Josh’s hand between her shoulder blades.

“ _You guys_ …” she said, feeling her voice waver dangerously. She barely noticed she was crying until her vision went wobbly and she pulled away, not wanting to get any of the pages wet. There were other things she wanted to say. _Tons_ of things. No matter how hard she tried, though, her mouth wouldn’t make the right shapes.

“We figured it was probably time you had a Hartley-brand photo album of your own,” Chris joked, his smile and laughter uncharacteristically modest. “Just wasn’t _right_ , we thought, for _almost_ all of the Almosts to get one but not _you_ , so…” **  
**

“Aaand…” Josh added, moving to Chris’s side of the table. “Check out this big ol’ blank page.” He tapped at the glittery HAPPY BIRTHDAY SAM!!! with his finger, the corners of his lips turning upwards devilishly. “Just _waiting_ to be filled with new memories!”

“So many memories.” Chris agreed. In a strange game of Musical Chairs, he got up from his seat, too, sitting on Sam’s other side, resting his elbow atop her shoulder. “Memories that you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life!”

“Memories you’ll think back on and remember with fondness.”

It was right about that time she began to suspect something stupid was afoot.

Ashley set her head on Sam’s other shoulder, murmuring a quiet, “I’m sorry,” and not even a _second_ later, it began. 

By the time the clapping started, she’d realized that Ashley and Chris moving seats had been a _strategic_ way to box her in…alas, it was already far too late. Sam didn’t embarrass easily (and this was no exception), but there was a certain breed of mortification that came with having a cabal of uniformed snack bar servers singing and dancing to their own version of the birthday song while everyone else in the building gawped at you.

Really, it was something to behold. 

She did her best to smile and stare out into middle space until it was done. That presented its own issues, though, as a bright flash went off in her face, startling her back into the real world. Across the table, Josh grinned from ear-to-ear, tugging a photo out of what had to be some sort of modern Polaroid camera. When he caught her eyes, he slapped the photo down onto the blank page with a flourish, then clapped his hands in time with the rest of the servers.

“I hate you guys,” she whispered as the group dispersed. “I hate you so, _so_ much. More than I have ever hated any _one_ or any _thing_ on this planet.”

“No you d— _cut it out!_ ” Chris blocked his eyes from another Polaroid flash, belatedly reaching over to try and smack Josh.

“Yes. Yes I d—oh, um, thanks.” Smiling uncomfortably, she nodded politely in the direction of the server who sashayed back over to them with the largest ice cream sundae she’d ever seen in her life. Insult to injury. She waited until the server left to shake her head. “I sat through…all of that…and I can’t even eat this.”

“No, but _we_ can.” Chris and Ashley were both already spoon-deep into the sundae. They didn’t waste time, those two. “Oh fuck Sam, you have _no_ idea what you’re missing out on. There’re fuckin’ _sprinkles_ on this thing!”

The camera’s flash went off again, momentarily blinding them all.

“ _Josh!_ ”

He yanked the photo out of the camera to keep any of them from grabbing at it. “That’s a good one. Real good. Absolutely going in the book.” When he glanced up from the camera, a strange change came over his face. Sam felt herself frown as she recognized it as…well, _recognition_. “Aw shit.” He stood, walking around to the side of the table. “Look what the cat dragged in!”

Sam followed his gaze, turning around in the bench to see what he was staring at.

Shit.

“ _Heeey!_ ” Emily’s singsong was positively bubbly. “Oh my God, what’re the chances, right?” Beside her, there was a moment of requisite ‘ _Sup man_ ’s as Mike and Josh went through the show of shaking hands and knocking shoulders.

“Wow, oh, hey!” The surprises just kept coming. “This is…wow. Coincidence, much?” She hoped her laugh sounded more natural than it felt, _especially_ when Emily bent over the back of the bench to give her a superficial squeeze. “You guys follow us here or something?”

“Actually, we just sort of followed the clapping and singing.” Mike popped his eyebrows up and down once, “Wanted to see the humiliation up close and personal.”

“Oh my gosh, that’s right! It _is_ pretty much your birthday, isn’t it?” Emily smiled as she said it, but Sam still felt something in her gut tense up. There was no way Emily _hadn’t_ known it was her birthday. “I’m _super_ embarrassed—if I’d thought we’d run into you, I would’ve brought you a present!”

She waved it off. “Don’t even think about it, Em. For real! I’ve never been much of a material gal. Uh…” Her eyes flicked to the others, wondering whether she’d be the one who’d have to send Emily and Mike packing. In all likelihood it _would_ be.

Happy birthday indeed.

“You guys meeting anybody or just tooling around?” Josh asked, glancing around the nearby tables. “We were just settling in for some _prime_ birthday shenanigans, and the more the merrier, right?”

What?

_What?_

Sam blinked, reassuming her smile when she realized how many of them were looking at her. “Yeah, the more the merrier!”

*******

**8:42pm**

“I don’t get it.”

“What? A twenty-minute wait for laser tag? It’s Saturday night! I was expecting it’d be a _lot_ longer—”

“No, doofus! I meant _that_.”

The pen clattered to the table as Josh finished his signature with a grandiose flick of his wrist. “What’re you freakazoids talking about?” When he turned to them, Ashley covertly nodded to guide his gaze back to their table. He seemed to consider it for a moment before he flipped his hands palm-up. “What’s not to get?”

Why in God’s name had she expected _understanding_ from either of them? Ashley clucked her tongue as she began, “I don’t—” and then promptly froze, looking around anxiously. Despite them being surrounded by the ear-piercing din of arcade machines and tvs, she lowered her voice. “I don’t get how they can just think, like, we _actually_ want them here.”

Chris slouched comfortably against the sign-in counter. “I mean, Josh _did_ tell them they could stay…”

“Yeah,” she said slowly, turning a suspicious eye to him. “Yeah, you sure did. That was…awfully polite of you.”

As though it was only just occurring to him (and it _was_ ), Chris blinked in Josh’s direction, posture going stiff. “Hey…yeah, hang on, wait a goddamn second…why _did_ you do that?”

“Why did I invite our lovely classmates to join Sam’s birthday bonanza? You’re asking why I did _that?_ See, this is why you guys don’t have friends. You never—”

“Oh no, no, no, no,” Ashley cut him off, rounding on him so the three of them stood in a rough triangle, their impromptu huddle isolated from the rest of the party center. Isolated from their table. “They weren’t _any_ of _our_ classmates.”

Josh watched her patiently enough, waiting to roll his eyes until he figured she was done. “Okay, _fine_ , if you wanna be _technical_ about it, no they weren’t. Still don’t see what the problem is. All I did was extend an invite to some old buds to—”

 _That_ was when Chris stood up from his lean. “Uh…‘old buds?’ _Dude_.”

“What?”

“They’re…” But man, what she _wanted_ to say wasn’t exactly… _cool_. She shot Chris a quick look, and though he was still staring at Josh, the shock on his face was all the reassurance she needed. “They’re not our _friends_ either.”

The noise Josh made wasn’t a laugh—not exactly—but it was close enough. “Wow. Just…just _wow_. Here I was, thinking us dorks were the _nice_ ones…” With a quirked brow and the faintest suggestion of a smirk, he patted both of their shoulders. “You guys ever stop and think ‘Huh! _Sam_ sure likes them! Surely there _must_ be some redeeming qualities there?’”

Ashley’s answer was immediate. “No.”

“Oof. Encyclopedia Brown comes in with the one-two-knockout! Look, part of being a grown-up is putting aside petty squabbles and trying to act civilly towards your friends’ other friends." 

“… _petty squabbles_.” She said it so quietly that the sound of her voice was swallowed up by the _ding!_ of a nearby skeeball machine. Ashley stared at him with all the open, earnest confusion of a child watching a magic show—only instead of pulling rabbits or doves out of a hat, Josh appeared to be pulling all of this out of his ass. It just kept coming and coming, a never-ending scarf-rope of bullshit. That didn’t pass her smell-test. Oh no it did _not_.

“ _What?_ ”

“Who are you and what did you do with Josh?”

“Oh my God. It’s Sam’s birthday!” He threw his arms out to his sides for emphasis, but it was immediately apparent Ashley and Chris weren’t going to be distracted. “Why can’t we just keep the party goin’ like normal people, huh? We’re a little _old_ for the high school drama crap, aren’t we?” Shaking his head, Josh moved to skirt past the both of them...

But oh, _that_ wasn’t going to fly.

Ashley swiftly stepped in front of him again. Her eyes were narrow with something deeper than suspicion, then, something that the guys recognized almost instantly. She was, after all, the Sherlock of the group…and fuck if it didn’t seem like she was putting all those pieces together. After a slow once-over, she set her arms akimbo, nose crinkling up. “No way, José, I don’t buy it. Why are you suddenly so _cool_ with this? With _them?_ After everything that happened at the lo—”

He reached out to set his hands on her shoulders, bending over until they were eye-to-eye. “Y’know, Ash…not for nothing, but _most_ nerdy girls _dream_ of being invited to the popular table. Have you never _seen_ a teen movie? Think of how _fortunate_ you are, here, I mean, consider all the weird fanfiction chicks you hung out with in study hall. How many of them would just be creaming their panties at the thought of hanging out at a party with _Michael_ - _fucking_ - _Munroe?_ My bet is, uh, most of them.” Pointedly ignoring the way her lip curled in disgust, Josh gave one of her cheeks a tender pat. “So how about this: We all just take a chill pill, shoot the shit, and then, when the time is right…we _flatten_ them in the laser tag arena?” He winked salaciously before planting an obnoxiously theatrical kiss on her forehead. “If nothing else, my precious rays of sunshine, think of it as research!”

“ _Research._ ”

“Yeah! You guys like that nerdy shit. Call it…an exercise in psychoanalysis.” And with that, he flashed them a quick double-pistols and a wink, brushing past Ashley before she could stop him again. “Take notes! I know _I_ will be!” 

They watched him saunter back to the table with eerily identical expressions of doubt. For a long while, neither quite knew what to say…and then, predictably, they started in at exactly the same time.

“What the _fuck_.”

“This is _so_ bizarre.”

“Is he out of his mi—”

“God, how obvious can he _be?_ ”

“Wait, wait. Wait. Stop.”

“I don’t—”

“No, stop! You go first.”

“Oh crap, I—no you! What were you—”

“Nonono, _you_ go. _What_ were you saying? How _obvious_ can he be? Obvious about _what?_ ”

Ashley let out a strained noise caught somewhere between a groan and a laugh. She scrubbed at the spot on her forehead Josh had kissed, her face still twisted with wariness. This had ‘bad news’ written all over it. “Well if you’re asking, then I guess it’s _not_ that obvious…”

“No, it is, it _definitely_ is…But let’s pretend for a second that you’re talking to an idiot. How would you proceed _then?_ ”

“Oh my God, Chris.”

“Just play with me in this space, Ash. Pretend I’m a moron.” 

Her laugh was significantly more genuine that time around. “He’s trying to look good for Sam. It’s like…incredibly transparent.”

“Uh…is it?”

“Yeah? Think about it! If he gets all buddy-buddy with them, then not only does he get to remind her how _suuuper_ charming he is in front of other people, but he can _also_ act like he’s the bigger person in the situation. Like he’s moved on from—” She paused with a wince, eyes momentarily flicking towards the table. It was the second time she’d _almost_ brought up the lodge in the past five minutes, and hoo boy, she did _not_ particularly enjoy that fact. “Well. You know.”

He shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “No, I…I gotcha.” The other part of her accusation seemed to hit him belatedly, “Wait. Whoa. _Impress_ Sam? Are you still on that?”

“On what?”

“Th-the whole…” Chris flailed his hands around as though hoping to be able to pull the right words out of the air. “Josh-Sam thing?”

Ashley met his gaze, eyebrows arched high under the swoop of her bangs. “Uh duh? Where have _you_ been?” She snorted a quiet laugh through her nose, “Trust me, okay, he’s trying _real_ hard to get into her good graces. It’s _for sure_ why he’s been on his best behavior all night.” Shaking her head, she turned to peruse the snack bar menu hanging overhead, folding her arms tightly across her chest. “I bet he thinks he’s being _crazy_ slick about it, too.”

“You are…absolutely out of your mind.”

She whirled around to face him again. “Excuse me?! Rude!”

“I don’t get why you’re so, so… _convinced_ that that’s a thing.”

“Oh, it’s a _thing_ , Chris,” she said lowly, lips pressing into an unimpressed line with the memory of her and Sam’s conversation.

“What, because they hang out all the time? They’re _friends!_ I swear, you guys all watch too many movies. Just because people—”

Her eyes found the menu again. “Yeah, sure they’re friends. Friends who’ve—” And there it was _again_. Hoping against hope that he hadn’t noticed, Ashley snapped her mouth shut and deliberately fixed her eyes on the horrible cartoon mozzarella sticks forming a conga line at the bottom of the snack bar’s menu. Chris had gone oddly quiet, though, so she wasn’t too surprised to find him staring at her when she chanced a glance in his direction.

After a _painful_ period of silence, he lifted a hand, motioning her on. “Friends who have…?”

Try as she might, there wasn’t any way to make her grimace look more like a smile; she just sort of bared her teeth. She shook her head as if to say ‘What? Me? I didn’t say anything! Nope, nothing at all!’ and briskly cleared her throat, taking a few jerky steps in the general direction of the table. “You know, we should probably just—”

“Oh. _Oh_. Oh nonono, I know that look! I know it! You—” As she had done to Josh only minutes ago, Chris rounded on her, _very_ effectively stopping her from skittering away. He leaned in close enough that he could lower his voice and still be heard. “You know something, don’t you?”

Staring up at him with wide, wide, just… _impossibly wide_ eyes, Ashley pressed her fists tightly against her mouth. She could’ve lied, but…lying wasn’t really her thing. Never had been. It wasn’t that she was _bad_ at it—she was downright _abysmal_. So instead, she just grinned behind her hands, feeling like her eyebrows might fly right off her face if they went any higher.

As he stared, Chris’s mouth began to fall open. “ _Ash…_ ”

She looked around the entrance anxiously, gaze flicking from one side of the room to the other so quickly that she made herself dizzy. “Um…” she hummed, voice taut and wavery. “That’s…a big question.”

“Is…” Chris took a second to look over his shoulder again, spotting the others still sitting around the table, apparently in the middle of some animated conversation. Well, that wasn’t completely accurate, but at the very least, Josh had on the face that always seemed to accompany one of his God-awful impressions, and the others seemed to be laughing. Or pretending to laugh. It amounted to about the same, really. “Is it a question you could answer…outside?” When Ashley met his eyes, he mimicked her and raised his eyebrows as high as they could go.

A wrinkle of uncertainty appeared on her forehead. Her stare went far-off, unfocused, her lower lip caught between her front teeth. “…maaaaaaaybe.”

That was all he needed.

He took her by the wrist, not _grabbing_ so much as _guiding_ , leading the both of them out of the automatic double-doors and into the parking lot. They took a few more steps away from the building, not turning again until the doors gave a pneumatic puff to signal they’d slid closed. Neither said anything for a second, simply taking in the sticky discomfort of the unseasonably muggy night. Their little corner of privacy reeked of old cigarettes and the ghosts of nachos made soggy by time. Not exactly the best, but fitting, somehow.

Ashley had folded her arms back across her chest in clear sign of discomfort. She took a deep breath in as though preparing to say something…and then let it out again. This was just…a lot. It was a lot. Bouncing on the balls of her feet slightly, she looked up at him, eyes still ridiculously wide (Chris suspected he’d be able to see his reflection in them if he’d been standing any closer). “I don’t know if I should tell you.”

Pantomiming some bizarre form of torture, he clenched and shook his fists in front of his face. “Ash, you are _killin’_ me, here!”

“I—”

“ _Killing_ me! You can’t just drop something like that and then clam up! That’s gotta be against the Geneva Convention or something! Can’t you give me like…a hint? Just a _hint?_ I’ll guess if you want me to guess.”

“Chris.”

“You like…” He shrugged, eyes rolling up towards the sky as he thought. “We could play Twenty Questions! Or we could yes and no it! Or we could—”

“I could…” Ashley’s mouth twisted into a grimace of uncertainty. “I shouldn’t…I mean, I…I guess I could tell you… _something_ …” Her lips pressed tightly together and she drew her arms in further, wrapping herself up in a defensive hug. For all intents and purposes, she looked like one of those little pillbugs that hid under rocks to avoid the sun…or maybe an armadillo rolling itself into a protective ball. 

Together, they watched a car pull out of its space, the lenses of Chris’s glasses momentarily glowing red from the taillights. By the time the driver had maneuvered out of the lot, hitting every single pothole in their way, Ashley appeared to have made up her mind. “If I say _anything_ , you can’t tell _anyone_.”

“Who would I tell?! You act like people _talk_ to me.” 

“No Chris, I _mean_ it. No one. Not Sam. _Definitely_ not Josh.” She met his eyes again, trying and failing to frown. “Not a _soul_.” 

“Not a soul.”

“I’m being serious!”

“Hey! So am I! What do you want, a blood oath? I—here.” Without missing a beat, he raised his right hand in a Boy Scout salute. “Eh? _Eh?_ Better?”

Her flat glare suggested that no, it was not better. After what seemed to be another considerable internal debate, she pulled her own right hand out from where it had been burrowed into her sweatshirt. No words. Just a look, a pursing of her lips, and her hand held out to him, pinky finger extended.

Chris pretended to gasp. “Aw snap, son, this shit _is_ serio—okay, okay, I’m _kidding!_ I’m joking.” He hooked his pinky around hers and willed his face to remain as stoic as possible. And it worked! For the most part. He appeared _mostly_ stoic. Very close to stoic. Admittedly, there was something cosmically comical about two full-grown adults pinky-swearing outside of what was essentially a bowling alley birthday party. “Man, you’re starting to make me antsy. Standing over here acting like you’ve been sworn to secrecy or some shit. What was that thing in _Harry Potter?_ The uh—”

“Unbreakable Vow.” Ashley let her hand slide away from his, her expression lightening up with something new, something…

Oh _shit_.

Something _excited!_

A grin, nervous but bright, spread across her face, and when she looked up at him again, her eyes were almost literally _sparkling_ like she was a goddamn Disney princess. “I didn’t promise anyone anything!” she hissed in a quiet little whisper, opening her mouth in a silent scream of glee. “I _didn’t!_ ”

“I gotta be honest with you here, I’m not sure I’m follow—”

She closed the space between them, keeping her voice hushed; the proximity alone made her heart leap. “Josh kissed Sam!”

“I—” Chris’s voice caught. Ashley watched the face journey begin. It took every ounce of her self-restraint to keep from laughing aloud. All of a sudden, Chris had the general appearance of someone who’d had the grave misfortune of walking in on his own parents fucking on the family couch. “ _What?!_ ”

“I _know!_ ” She huddled herself even closer to him. “ _I know!_ They—right?!”

He stared. And stared. And blinked. And waited as though expecting her to laugh, or maybe slap her knee and point at him, yelling ‘Ahaha! Gotcha!’ When she _didn’t_ do any of those things, when it became obvious that it was a revelation and not a bad bit, he actually sat himself down on the concrete curb, trying to work it all out in his head. “You’re shitting me.” His voice cracked like he was twelve all over again.

“I’m not!”

“You are _literally_ shitting me.”

“I’m not!” There was a soft sound of fabric rustling as she lowered herself down next to him, body angled so their knees all but touched. “I _swear_ I’m not! _Sam_ told me! I freaked too, like—”

Chris held up a hand. “Nonono. They…she had to be messing with you. She was goofing.”

“She wasn’t! She was _so_ serious!”

“But they’re…they aren’t…they’re not _together_ ,” he finally managed to force out, glasses sliding down his nose. “Or… _are they?!_ I know shit’s been, uh, tense lately, but we’d…we’d _know_ if they were _together_ …wouldn’t we?!” Helplessly, he held his hands out towards her. “Explain. God, please, just…explain. I don’t…”

She patted his shoulder sympathetically. “Go on, take a second. I remember the feeling.”

“It doesn’t make _sense_ , Ash! It just doesn’t make _sense!_ ”

“Uh huh, uh huh. It took me a little while to stop yelling, too.”

Dropping his head into his hands, Chris stared blankly down at the concrete. “Explain,” he repeated, voice strained. “Explain, please.”

That was a tall order. She shifted on the curb to try and find a more comfortable position, impossible as it seemed, and flipped through her memories of the conversation. Again, it was just…a lot. It wasn’t often that she found herself struggling with storylines, but this was one she was still grappling with, to be _sure_. “Okay, so, hmm…okay, bullet points: my grad party, _he_ kissed _her_ , _she_ kissed _back_ —”

“She kissed _back?!_ ”

“I _know!_ ”

“The fuck!”

“ _I know!_ ” Man, when she’d brought it up, Sam had acted like she was out of her mind. At least _Chris_ got it.

“Wait, your _grad party?!_ We were _right there!_ The whole night!”

“Yup.”

“How did we miss that?! _Where were_ _we?!_ ”

“According to Sam? The pool.”

Head still in his hands, Chris raised his eyes, staring straight ahead instead of at his feet. “Hey Ash?”

“Yeah-huh?”

“What the fuck.”

She giggled, setting her elbows down onto her knees as she bent down towards him again. “No, we’re not done yet. Cuz, see, turns out…that wasn’t the _only_ time.”

He dropped one hand to dangle between his knees, staring up at her from over the rims of his glasses. “No.”

“Hand to God.”

“ _No_.”

“I don’t have details on _that_ ,” she admitted with a sigh, “I just know it _happened_. So…”

Chris made a noise that couldn’t quite make up its mind about what it wanted to be. Agreement maybe, but more likely just a silence-filler.

Logically, they both knew what was happening the moment it began to unfurl its awful leathery wings—somehow the shock of the revelation had given way to thought, and _shit_ , that was the _last_ thing you wanted to happen mid-party. It was the same sense of unsteadiness that bowled you over when upon catching a glimpse of your own reflection in some stranger’s bathroom mirror, three drinks in at some social event you didn’t want to go to in the first place; it was the sinking realization of ‘ _Oh fuck this is real, this is_ all _real_ ’ that crept up at the worst possible moments, sucking everything in its path down into a swirling vortex of introspection and existential dread.

God, they were a little old to be having serious life experiences sitting outside of a laser tag place. Or maybe they were a little _young_ to be having serious life experiences outside of a laser tag place. Either way, it wasn’t exactly _ideal_.

“I don’t…get it,” Chris said finally, finding solace in staring at the spot just between his shoes. 

A few loose rocks crunched under Ashley’s high-tops as she ground her toes into the concrete. “What _part?_ The Sam-and-Josh dynamic? Because I _definitely_ don’t get that. I really thought Sam, _of all people_ , would have higher standards than like, broody, aspiring film student, but I guess what do _I_ know…”

“No, not th—well yeah, okay, _that_ —but no, I meant the…just…it’s the…h-h-how are they _doing_ that?” He frowned, pushing his glasses further up his nose when he noticed them slipping. “How do you…how do you go and do something like _kiss your friend_ and then just… _keep going_ like everything’s _fine?!_ How do you _do_ that?!”

“Yeah, I…don’t know.” The zipper of her hoodie jingled quietly when she shook her head. “It’s _bonkers_. I mean like…power to ‘em, right? _Carpe diem_ or whatever, but…can you even imagine?”

“No.” He cleared his throat a bit louder than entirely necessary. “I mean, uh. It’d just…I’d…I’d be _way_ too scared of…” He took a breath and tried not to focus on the cheerful sounds of the arcade just inside the sliding doors. “…messing everything up." 

She watched the scuffed toes of her shoes turn inwards to rest almost perpendicularly to each other. If she hadn’t known better, she could’ve sworn the same gravel crunching under her shoes had somehow found its way into her throat, turning it dry and scratchy. She was quiet for a few seconds before letting out a soft, deflated, “Yeah.”

Then they were _both_ quiet. It was _all_ quiet, no one coming or going from the parking lot, the threat of rain scaring off the evening birds and insects, even the victorious ringing of the skeeball machines inside sounding distant, as though they were pumping out tickets in another world, another _life_.

“Because wh-what if it broke bad, y’know? The other person gets weirded out, or they feel… _different_ than you do, or, or, or…shit, I dunno, just…what if you did something like that and it just ruined… _everything?_ ”

She pulled her sleeves up in the way she always did when there was nothing else for her to anxiously fiddle with, only the first two knuckles of her fingers visible over the cuffs. With her chin in her hands, her fingers formed a sort of cage over her mouth, hiding her expression while simultaneously giving her the appearance of getting ready for a _mean_ harmonica solo. “But what if it _didn’t?_ ”

“…huh?”

The half of her face visible over her hands furrowed thoughtfully, her forehead creasing and eyes narrowing, eyebrows drawing close together in a familiar caricature of worry. She doubted this was what Sam had envisioned for her when she’d given her little pep talk in the dorm. But it was _something_ , wasn’t it? It was _something_. “It didn’t mess things up for _them_ , did it?”

“I uh, I guess not.”

The strips of lights illuminating the entrance to the party center gave them a weird Technicolor cast, sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes red, and while it had grated on her nerves at first, Ashley was suddenly unspeakably grateful for the cover it gave her. She had the singular suspicion that she was bordering on cherry tomato territory by that point in the conversation.

Next to her, Chris was quiet for a considerable time. It didn’t worry her as much as she would’ve thought. She wasn’t one for betting, but if she _had_ been, she would’ve put her money on him trying to come up with some sort of wisecrack. “And let’s face it, Josh is pretty good at messing things up on his own, so really this is kind of a miracle, when you think about it.”

 _Cha-ching._ Maybe she needed to _become_ a betting woman. “You’re probably right." 

She watched him from her periphery, swallowing hard around the lump of anxiety weighing down her tongue; Chris made another pass at casually clearing his throat, making the executive decision to fully lift his head and look her way. It could’ve been her imagination (it was _probably_ her imagination), but it seemed like it took more effort than he wanted to acknowledge. “… _buuut?_ ”

“Hmm?”

“I’m probably right _but…_ ” Chris repeated, waving his hand to try and spur her on. When she didn’t, he managed a laugh (admittedly more _frantic_ than usual), jokingly setting his hands on his hips. “Ash, I don’t know that I remember a single time in my life where you’ve followed the phrase ‘You’re right, Chris!’ with anything _other than_ ‘but.’ It doesn’t _happen_. So…where does the but come in?”

She blinked at him, clearly not understanding, and then all the tension drained from her posture. Like flushing a toilet. Or uh, flipping a switch. Either one. “ _Wow_. Way to make me sound like a total tyrant!”

“I’m just saying—”

“I don’t _always_ say but!”

“Okay…you _usually_ do, though.”

“No I don’t!”

“Mmm...”

“Just—just like, forget it, okay? There’s no but. There’s…nothing. It’s nothing.” Ashley flipped her hair out of her face, craning her head back to stare up towards the night sky. Her shoulders rose and fell in a heavy breath, telling him without words that yes, there _was_ a but, there _was_ something, and it _was_ going to be a Thing, capital-T and all.

He didn’t say anything. Nah, he just nodded, following her line of sight to trace the moon through the clouds. Maybe if she’d turned his way, Ashley would’ve seen him mouth ‘ _It’s just…_ ’ to himself, would’ve seen him manage to grin _and_ cringe when the next words out of her mouth were exactly that. But she _didn’t_ look at him. She wasn’t sure she _could_.

“It’s just…what if they’re… _right?_ ” She hugged her knees tighter to her chest, still pointedly staring up into the stars. “I mean think about it—if _they_ can make it work with all the baggage they’re dragging behind them—”

“It _is_ a lot of baggage…surprisingly little of it designer.”

“—then maybe it…works. Maybe it works! Maybe people spend too much time sitting around worrying about how bad it _could_ be, when it doesn’t really happen that way. Cuz you’re already friends, and you already _know_ the other person, and you have some kind of…connection or something, and you like each other…” Ugh. Her fingers found their way into her hair, anxiously tucking it behind her ears. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I just think that…lots of people have been friends for _longer_ than they have, and not to say that you have to be friends with someone for a long time to be _close_ , but—”

“Yeah, yeah, def…”

“—maybe it just _seems_ riskier than it actually is. Or scarier. Or whatever. Because what if you do it and take the plunge and things _don’t_ get messed up? What if you’ve spent all this time imagining how _badly_ you’ll ruin everything, and then it turns out that it’s _fine?_ What if it’s _more_ than fine?” There it was, there was the moment where she knew she had to turn. Ashley hoped to God (or any other deity that might’ve taken pity on her) that she had managed to find some sort of normal human expression to plaster onto her face as she met his eyes. The lights above them went red, all but erasing the flushing of her face and ears, and if _that_ wasn’t divine intervention, she didn’t know what _was_. “What if it makes everything… _better_ than it already was?”

Reading people was usually the thing she was best at. It was less a superpower than it was a side effect of her anxiety, she knew, but it had served her well enough. Nine times out of ten, she could pick up on those small, unimportant cues most other people missed in social interactions; the things you took for granted unless you’d _learned_ to look for them.

But with Chris? Oh, with Chris, she was a _lousy_ mind reader.

She couldn’t begin to make heads or tails of what he was thinking as they sat there, the fluorescents pulsing above them like some strange replica of the northern lights, the sky rumbling with the distant threat of rain. No matter how hard she tried, she just kept finding herself looking not for the signs that were there, but for the ones she was most afraid of: dropped eyes, frowning, flinching, wincing, pulling back.

 _God,_ she wished she was more like Sam. 

The look on Chris’s face was hard to parse, but she didn’t _think_ it was in the revulsion family, so that was at least…a start. He seemed to be struggling with _something_ internally, though, and that was less reassuring. “Ash, I, uh—”

Her muscles seemed to take on a life of their own all at once, sending her springing to her feet a bit too quickly for her own liking. Smooth. Just real, real smooth. “Yeah, I know, it’s stupid,” she said with a tense laugh, brushing the dust from the seat of her pants. “Like I said, I don’t even know what I’m talking about, so…um, think we should head back inside? Check the time?”

“Uh, I, yeah? Yeah, we should…do that.”

She held her hands down to help him up and he gratefully took them. “Remember, okay? You can’t tell _anyone_ that I told you—”

“I won’t! I _won’t_.”

“Okay, _good_ , because Sam didn’t tell me _not_ to say anything, but if _Josh_ hasn’t said anything, then—” 

“Hey, uh…” She still couldn’t place the look on Chris’s face. She wished she could. “For what it’s worth…”

Ashley blinked up at him as the lights above their heads bled from blue to green. “…yeah?" 

“Maybe…I mean, i-i-if _they_ can pull it off and still be cool, then uh…maybe, maybe you’re right.” _That_ look she _did_ know. “Maybe it, uh, maybe it would be _fine_.”

There was an impossibly loud chug from the door behind them as the doors slid open. They both jumped about a mile, whirling around to the source of the sound. “Hey, hey, party people!” Mike had hung himself halfway out of the door, his elbow wedged against the jamb to keep it from closing on him. “Hop to—it’s time for a little ol’ fashioned gunslingin’!”

Emily’s appeared next to him for only a moment. “ _Ugh_.” She rolled her eyes as he pretended to blow smoke from a finger-gun, vanishing behind him again, no doubt heading for the laser tag section of the party center.

“Um, oh, okay.”

“On our way!”

“Coolio.” He made to enter the building again, pausing to give them a more interested look. “I wasn’t _interrupting_ anything, was I?” Mike wagged his finger between the two of them as he asked it, bringing attention to that fact that yup, yup, oh yeah, they were…definitely still holding hands.

“ _Oh!_ Uh, it’s…”

They pulled away from one another as though they’d been burnt, both sheepishly hurrying past Mike to get back into the building…neither exactly giving an answer.

“Hey! Where’d you get off to? Did—oookay…” Sam let herself be dragged along when Ashley snatched her up and looped their arms together. The gentle teasing in her voice gave way to something else entirely, “Uh, everything okay?" 

“Fine.” Ugh, her voice wasn’t right. She swallowed a couple times to try and loosen her throat up. She thought she might go and puke all over the front of her sweatshirt if she tried to say more than that. Her heart was racing at roughly a _trillion_ miles an hour, her stomach swirling with powdery butterfly wings, and boy oh boy did she need to sit down and just _breathe_ for a few minutes.

Thankfully, Sam took it at face value, bumping her shoulder with hers as they made their way towards the arena.

“So what were we thinking?” The employee looked almost horrifically chipper as she started doling out vests and guns. “How are we splitting up the teams?”

As was usually the case, Josh was the one to speak up first. He took the vest offered to him, sliding it on over his head, “Now that’s a tough question right there. I’d _figured_ we’d be going the tried and true ladies vs. gents route, but upon further thought, that feels sorta unbalanced.”

“Um…unbalanced _how?_ ” Emily seemed more hesitant to claim her vest. She watched the others take theirs, pulling an elastic band from her wrist; she turned her attention more fully onto Josh as she gathered her hair into a low ponytail. “Didn’t take _you_ for the piggish type.”

“I can assure you, this has _nothing_ to do with gender, Miss Davis! What I _meant_ was us guys have more _experience_.”

“Experience.” Sam’s tone was flatter than a pancake. “You want us to believe that you ding-dongs have _experience_.”

“Well, I mean, I guess that depends on your definition. Have I _seen_ combat? Yeah! Has it been like, _fictional_ combat? Also yeah. Pretty sure it still counts.” Even as he spoke, Ashley couldn’t figure out whether Chris had been affected _at all_ by what she’d said. Was _his_ throat still as tight as hers? Was—okay, no. No…the night was supposed to be about _Sam_. Not _them_. She pushed it from her mind.

Tried to, at least.

Without missing a beat, Sam turned to the employee and shook her head. “We’re gonna do guys vs. girls, thanks.”

“Hoho! That sounds like a _challenge!_ ” Mike beamed, rubbing his hands together before unslinging his gun from its holster. “I’ll have you know I’m an _incredible_ hunter.”

Emily groaned loudly. “When have you _ever_ hunted, _Michael?_ ”

His sly expression flickered for an instant, a trace of annoyance shining through his self-assured swagger. _That_ was interesting. “I’ve hunted, Em.”

“With _who?_ Please.”

“Considering Cochise and I are over here flapping our gums about video game prowess, I know that I, for one, am glad to have you on the team, man.” Ashley watched whatever was going on between Mike and Emily fizzle away as Josh clapped his hand on Mike’s shoulder. “I’ll take hypothetical hunting over the Yoga Squad any day of the week.”

“Nice, Josh. Real nice. Just for that? I hope you know I’m going to have to destroy you.”

“Ooh! Some smacktalk from the birthday girl! Mark me down as scared _and_ horny.”

“Classy.”

Mike and Emily were the first to get squared away. They headed out of the prep area and into the main floor, Mike cracking some joke they couldn’t hear before flourishing his gun. Emily recoiled _immediately_. “You point that thing anywhere _near_ my face, and we’re gonna have a problem, mister.” If it had been meant to come out affectionately, well…it missed its mark.

“Is, uh…is anyone gonna comment on _that_ one?” Josh asked, voice little more than a whisper.

“Nope,” Sam said brightly, marching forward into the arena.

Chris finished buckling his vest with a quiet snicker. “Look, there are some things even _I_ won’t touch, okay? And _that’s_ one of ‘em.” He flashed them a brief (and laughably _incorrect_ ) salute, “See you guys on the other side!” And then he trotted off after Sam, the lenses of his glasses flaring strangely in the semi-darkness as he looked for a hiding spot.

Under the bulky weight of the vest, Ashley felt very much like a little kid being strapped into a lifejacket—unsteady, out of her element, _tiny_. Still, it served to center her a little, weighting her down to the earth instead of letting her flutter in the breeze as she had been since…well. That. She hoisted her gun up, testing its heft in her hands, and was startled when something solid pushed against her solar plexus with a _click_.

Josh held his gun out, its side pressed harmlessly to her vest. “So,” he said, voice kept low despite the chaotic techno music beginning to pump through the arena’s speakers. “Time to put your money where your mouth is, girly girl. Ten bucks says I can pop Regina George over there more than _you_ can get the Ken doll.”

“Oh _please_ ,” she muttered, watching from the archway as the others scattered to hide.

“Sounds to me like you’re scared of losing.” He quirked an eyebrow and jostled her with his gun. “That’s fine. Totally fine! I wouldn’t wanna go against me either.”

“Oh no, I’m taking your bet.”

“That so?”

She tried not to smirk, not wanting to give herself away too early. “Mhm. I will _happily_ take your money.” The LEDs marking their vests and guns burst to life as the buzzer signaling the start of the match went off.

“Game on,” he grinned, pulling his gun away at _precisely_ the right moment. Before he could take so much as a step, his vest lit up like a Christmas tree, emitting the sad, sad noise that meant he’d been shot.

Too late. She’d started sprinting the _second_ she’d pulled the trigger, already yards away from him. “Game on!” Ashley shouted over her shoulder, ducking behind a barricade just in time to avoid his retaliating shot. She was going to be ten dollars richer by the end of the night—of that, at least, she was _sure_.


End file.
